Google Photos ends its unlimited free storage policy for pictures at ‘high resolution’ starting today, June 1, 2021.
The policy change was announced in November last year. The policy change also means Google wants more consumers to pay up for the cloud storage service.
Google offers 15GB of free storage space. This space is divided across Gmail, Google Drive and Photos. Under the earlier policy, photos at the high or express resolution, which are both compressed formats, did not account towards free storage. This meant one could upload photos for free without worrying about running out of storage.
From June 1, these photos will count towards the 15GB free quota. If you are continuously uploading photos to your Google account, then you will perhaps need to buy some extra storage space.
Google says earlier photos are not impacted by the policy change. So even if you were not a paying customer for Google One, the earlier photos will not count towards your storage and you don’t need to worry about transferring or deleting these in order to get extra space. But all photos uploaded from June 1 will be counted towards your storage space.
