Google Preps Users for Photos Changes
With Google Photos changing its storage policies in one week, the firm is reminding users about the change and offering some transition help.
“Six months ago, we announced a change to our High quality storage policy that allows us to keep pace with the growing demand for storage and build Google Photos for the future,” Google director Andy Abramson writes. “On Tuesday, June 1, we’ll start rolling out this change so that any new photos and videos you back up will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account or the additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member.”
As noted, Google announced this change six months ago, in November 2020. This angered a lot of users for obvious reasons, but when I thought about Google Photos as a service and how valuable it is to me, I found that I was OK with paying for the service. I recommend others do as well.
Anyway, Google isn’t backing down from the announced change, but it is providing a few things that it says will make the transition easier. These include:
Storage estimates. A new view on Google Photos will estimate how long your storage will last given your previous usage of the service. Google estimates that it will take over 80 percent of users three years to reach the free 15 GB of storage limit for High Quality uploads. And it says it will notify users as they get close to that free limit and follow up by email.
Storage quota management. Today, Google began rolling out a new Google Photos tool to help free users more easily manage the photos and videos they’ve backed up that count toward their storage quota. This tool will display photos or videos you might want to delete—like blurry photos, screenshots, and large videos, Google says—so you can make the best use of the storage.
Clearer naming. Google is renaming the High quality storage tier to Storage saver soon. The other tier is still called Original quality.
Of course, those that use Google Photos can and should purchase more storage through Google One where available.