Thursday 3 June 2021

Google Photos Free Storage is no more...



If you're like me and have been taking advantage of Google's generous offering to store an unlimited number of photos for free, Tuesday was truly a sad day. From the 1st of June, all photos stored in Google photos count towards your free storage quota of 15GB. 

Previously, photos stored in High Quality (reduced resolution but still good enough except for maybe large prints) were exempt from this and only Original Quality photos ate into your storage space.

So what does this mean? Well, it means we have to look at alternatives for storing our photos and maybe change one or two habits. 

If you're serious about photos, you probably already store your photos on some kind of physical media. This would mean regularly plugging your phone into a computer and transferring photos manually to an external hard drive. I started doing this years ago, as I firmly believe that storing something in only one place is probably not a good idea. However, Google Photos came along and I quickly got sucked into the convenience of simply turning it on and forgetting about it. 

So now it's time to go back to the drawing board. What are the realistic options?