Thinking About Google Photos (Premium)

Last week, Google announced that it was discontinuing free, unlimited photo storage in its Google Photos service, enraging fans. I get it, sort of: No one can dispute that Google has a reputation for discontinuing services and that that history plays a role in the outrage. But for this Google Photos customer and fan, nothing has changed: I was already paying for Google Photos and I will continue to do so. And if photos matter at all to you, I recommend you do the same.

As Google’s David Lieb explained on Twitter, Google Photos has over 1 billion users and they upload an astonishing 28 billion photos to the service every week. The service currently stores over 4 trillion photos. His assessment of Google Photos is both correct and poignant: The service isn’t just cloud storage, it’s “the home of our life’s memories, the place we go when we’re feeling nostalgic. It’s the closest many of us have to a record of our lives.”

As much sense as that makes, I know that many Google Photos users feel that the online giant has played a game of bait and switch with them: After getting them hooked on Google Photos, they’re yanking the proverbial rug out from under them and making them pay for a service that, to date, has been free.

But that’s not exactly true.

Google isn’t switching off the ability to upload an unlimited number of photos to Google Photos---using the “high quality” settings---for free until June 2021. That means that users can today upload literally any number of photos to the service, for free, and never need to worry about that again. All “high quality photos and videos you back up before June 1 are exempted” from the new storage restrictions. So pile it on while you still have time.

What’s changing is that starting on June 1, 2021, Google will begin holding all high quality photos (and videos) stored in Google Photos against a 15 GB storage allotment that is shared across  Google Drive (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, or Jamboard), Gmail, and Google Photos. (Original quality photos have always been held against this allotment.)

Most Google customers will upgrade their storage through a service called Google One. Here, you can pay $1.99 per month (about $24 per year) for 100 GB of storage or $2.99 per month (about $36 per year) for 200 GB of storage, and those who opt for that latter option also get 3 percent back in Store credit on Google Store purchases. There’s also a 2 TB option that costs $9.99 per month ($120 per year), and those customers get 10 percent back in the Google Store plus access to a Google VPN service on Android.

Folks, those are reasonable prices.

I have uploaded my entire lifetime of photos, in original quality on phones and including all of the pre-digital photos I’ve scanned, to Google Photos and I’m currently using 127 GB of storage. (Because my account is a G Suite commercial account, I don’t have access to Google One, so my cheapest option i...

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