Deepak Singh | Published on 28 May 2021
Free unlimited lifetime storage for Photos was arguably one of the best Google services available. Users could choose to backup unlimited photos in “high-quality” for free or backup “original quality” photos against their allotted drive storage. But alas, all good things must end.
Come June 1, and Google will revoke the option for free “high-quality” uploading. It will also now change the name “high quality” to “storage saver”, which should be a better indication of the compressed nature of these images.
The reason for the abrupt change in policy is simple - free back-ups are costing Google a lot of money. According to the mountain-view giant, more than 28 billion photos are uploaded to Google photos every week, and it isn’t economically viable anymore to pile these on its servers for free.