Google photos to count towards 15GB limit from June 2021 :(

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Caporegime
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Had an email from Google this morning saying:

'Starting June 1, 2021, all new photos and videos backed up in High quality will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with your Google Account or any additional storage you may have purchased, the same way other Google services like Google Drive and Gmail already do.'

This is a bit of a bugger for me personally and a fairly significant change, designed I'm sure to move people towards paid storage as they fill up the 15GB with Gmail etc.

On the other hand, a 'free' backup service of this standard is fairly unusual I believe, so maybe it's just that we've been enjoying a service that we never should have expected for free.
 
It is my only subscription. I don't pay for things lightly but my memories have been crucial to me for years and warrant the paid storage.

e: oh not true, I also pay for a vpn
 
So is that both original and high quality now a paid service?

Edit
Sadly I think that's the case
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-photos-free-storage-1176862/
It was becoming too expensive to offer unrestricted backups, in other words. The leader noted that users upload 28 billion photos and videos per week, and there were already 4 trillion photos on Google’s servers.
Click to expand...

That's a huge amount of data!
 
completely understandable considering those figures!!

I pay £2.49 a month for 200gb. No one can criticise that price - great backup software, the Photos app is second to none
 
The wording on that sounds like only new photos will count towards the limit, rather than existing photos also being subject to it.

skaif said:
So is that both original and high quality now a paid service?

Edit
Sadly I think that's the case
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-photos-free-storage-1176862/


That's a huge amount of data!
Click to expand...

It's their fault for their app providing the auto-image upload.

The number of photos/video's i've taken, not for memory purposes, but to show something in the moment type of thing that i'm not too fussed about having uploaded to Google Photos. I know you can switch off the auto-upload, but that kinda defeats the point of having to switch it on and off depending on whether you want to keep the photos or not.
 
NVP said:
I thought I was paying less than that for 2TB... perhaps I'm not. Will have to check.
Click to expand...

2TB is about 4 times that.

I already pay about £8/mth for my gsuite sub, which gives me unlimited storage, although with the threat that Google could remove the "unlimited" part at any time.
 
Guess I'll be subbing..... It'll be hard to mentally migrate after 10 years....

Time to dust off those old spinny HDDs maybe
 
Alternatively, just install something like https://syncthing.net/ on your phone and your PC and set it to monitor the relevant folders on your phone. Any photos or videos I take on my phone are backed up to both my home PC and backup server within a few seconds. I also use it to sync my Keepass database between all my devices in real-time.
 
Bit confused, if I check my google storage amount, it already says I have 2.8GB under photos. Maybe I have some set to backup as original rather than just high quality, but I was sure I always went for the latter. As I understand, they are saying high quality doesn't currently contribute to your allowance total but will in future.

So

a) how do I check which are backed up as original at the moment ?
b) how do I see the size of my high quality ones, in order to see which plan I should be expecting to have to buy?
 
Another reason to get amazon prime :)

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I've had Prime for years and never actually realised they have unlimited photo backup included.

Problem solved for me I guess (as long as I carry on paying for Prime!).
 
Problem is, we've had it easy with data. It is had been 1gb and paid past that, there wouldn't that much data to worry about because people would think twice before taking 5 photos of the same thing, delete photos and videos quicker and / or print photos out like the olden times
 
Hmm £79 for 2TB Google & Dropbox but may look into Amazon AWS (S1, S2 whatever) once I've done their cloud certification through work. Sounds like it can workout quite cheap, at least until you need to download a huge chunk due backup restoration but then how often does that happen?
 
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