Google Photos’ “free and unlimited storage” will be a thing of the past as of June 1st — which means that you’ve only got a few weeks left to upload all your pictures and videos before the company’s new 15GB cap kicks in. As the company had previously announced last fall, Google Photos’ beloved policy of allowing users to back up an unlimited number of “high quality” photos and videos will be ending next month, replaced by a 15GB limit before customers will have to pay for more storage space.
But everyone gets to start fresh with that 15GB (minus whatever you’re already using with your Gmail and Google Drive accounts, which might be a lot for some users) starting on June 1st: anything you’ve uploaded beforehand won’t count toward that cap, meaning that if you’ve got a pile of pictures on your camera or hard drive, it’s a good time to upload them.
There are a few catches, of course: the unlimited storage still only applies to “high-quality” photos, which are compressed down to 16-megapixel stills. Anything uploaded with the “original quality” counts toward your storage cap — although, unless you’re a Pixel owner, that’s already been the case for years, so that’s not much of a change.
Similarly, current Google Pixel owners — who get unlimited original quality pictures under the current policy, before getting downgraded to unlimited “high quality” pictures on June 1st — should take the rest of May to upload any pictures they haven’t put on Google Photos before the lower quality limit kicks in. Of course, you can always pay more for Google’s storage once June 1st comes along (prices start at $2 per month for an extra 100GB). But why not make the most of Google’s free space now before the deadline comes up?
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