Two years ago, Flickr free accounts changed from 1TB free storage to 1,000 items, which was a drastic difference. In response to this, many users moved over to Google Photos due to their unlimited storage free service. It has now been announced that on June 1st, 2021 Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage.
From this date, Google Photos will offer a free 15GB of storage for Gmail and Drive. All photos and documents uploaded before June 1st will not count against that 15GB cap. Anything uploaded after this date will start to count towards the 15GB limit. Google Pixel device owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st, without those images counting against their cap, thus an incentive and advantage to use Google’s phones with their cloud services.
Alerts will be sent automatically to users who begin to approach their caps and Google is putting in new storage management tools that make it easier to find and delete photos, for example blurry images or screenshots. Once the storage goes over the cap, users will need to buy a Google One subscription plan. Google offers three subscription plans: £1.59pcm for 100GB of storage; £2.49pcm for 200GB; and £7.99pcm for 2TB.
Google claims it is currently hosting over 4 trillion photos with 28 billion photos and videos uploaded everyday! The decision to have paid space therefore has some reasoning, however, it has been noted that now Google has taken the lead in this market and smaller services have failed, Google are starting to monetise this advantage. Google points out that it offers more free storage than other services, for example Apple’s iCloud offers only 5GB free in comparison to Google’s 15GB. It is also claimed that 80 percent of Google Photos users won’t hit that 15GB cap for at least three years. Nevertheless, for many users this will be disappointing news.