Come June 1, 2021, Google Photos would end their free storage services, as announced by Shimrit Ben-Yair, vice president of Google Photos, in tech giant’s official blog.
The product was launched primarily as a picture and video storage cloud service by Google for its smartphone users. It later expanded to encompass a wide range of functionalities, namely, storage, management of pictures and videos, editing and memories of past events.
While the free storage would not completely be scrapped, a cap on the maximum free storage space for high quality images and videos would be set at 15 gigabytes per account.
This would imply that the users in need of more than 15 GB space for high quality content would be charged as per the costing and storage requirements.
Google has also made it clear that the existing high quality content would be independent of this change next year.
Considering that this is a big change given the magnitude of the users, Google has also assured that they have to make no decisions about the changes to the app presently. The company also said that the announcement is being made well in advance for the users to be prepared for the new costing policy.
When a user, after June 1, 2021, nears their storage limit of 15 GB, Google services would notify the user of the same via the Google Photos application and follow up via email. As an estimate in the blog suggests, an average user would take a minimum of three years to reach the 15 GB free storage limit.
As a reward to its loyal customer base, users of Google Pixel range of smartphones would be exempted from this change for buying Google’s own flagship smartphone.
To enable customers to become accustomed to the new change, Google has also planned to introduce new tools that would help in managing and organising the storage space in Google Photos app.
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