By 
If you didn’t know/didn’t notice, Google has been offering free unlimited photo storage for the last five years. Terming them as ‘free photo backups at ‘high quality.’ Well now it looks like the old adage ‘nothing is free’ is making itself known.
Google Free Unlimited Storage Ends in 2021
In order to welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future, we are changing our unlimited High-quality storage policy.
Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used. The change will happen on June 1st, 2021, and it comes with other Google Drive policy changes.
Start off your week with tech news recap and trending conversations in your inbox
These include counting Google Workspace documents and spreadsheets against the same cap. Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.
With Google, you get more free storage than others i.e. 15GB instead of the paltry 5GB that Apple’s iCloud gives you. It’s also important to note that for most people, you will not reach that 15GB max for at least 3 years.
What Happens to Photos From The Past?
Well, all photos and documents uploaded before June 1st will not count against that 15GB cap. Only photos uploaded after June 1st will begin counting against the cap. This means you have plenty of time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or switching to another cloud storage provider for your photos.
Google already counts “original quality” photo uploads against a storage cap in Google Photos. However, taking away unlimited backup for “high quality” photos and video also take away one of the service’s biggest selling points. It was the photo service where you just didn’t have to worry about how much storage you had.
Why Change?
It looks like Google is doing its best to get people to pay for their new product, Google One. Google One pricing is as follows
- It starts at KES 217 / month for 100GB
- 200GB KES 326/ month)
- 2TB (KES 1089 / month)
- 30TB (16,356 / month)
Comments