Not Everything In Life Is Free – Forever (Google Photos Alert!)
In case you missed it, Google just announced that its popular photo and video storage, Google Photos, will no longer remain free for unlimited use starting June 1st, 2021. All new photos and videos that you upload will count against your 15 GB limit.
What does that mean for your existing storage? Well, you can continue to keep storing images and videos in the compressed & unlimited format on the Google servers. Once we hit the milestone date of June 1st, 2021, all new content you upload will count against your 15 GB limit. New content here includes your Google Sheets, Docs, Forms, etc. Now you might be thinking that you will create a second Gmail account just to continue storing more images for the new 15 GB storage you just received. Hold on before you get to that!
Real Impact
According to Wikipedia, in November 2020, Google announced that they have over 4 trillion photos stored with at least 28 billion new photos and videos being added every week. All currently stored images and videos will not count towards your 15 GB limit and you start with a new counter from June 1st. According to the VP of Google Photos, Shimrit Ben-Yair, over 80% of the users should easily be able to add more than 3 years’ worth of memories even after this date before they reach their quota.
Personalized Storage Space Left
Google also shows you a personalized estimate of how long your storage will last based on how frequently you back up your photos and how many you upload each time. Starting June 2021, Google Photos will also have a free tool to help you identify the dark & blurry photos that you may want to delete and also screenshots that you took that may not be needed anymore.
Storage Management Tool
Although we knew this day was coming at some point, it has finally come, and it does not seem like the end of the world. With successful rollouts of the deletion tool, the only other thing we could ask for is that Google asks us which individual photos we want to upload when we have clicked a burst of 25 pictures of the same scene.
If you are anything like me, I take multiple pictures of the same place with the hope of deleting them later, but never really get to it. I guess the new deadline for me is June 1st, 2021. But if you still feel confined by the 15 GB limit, Google will offer storage options starting at $2 per month for 100GB, and there are multiple service providers for storage like Dropbox and Flickr out there for you.
