Google Photos To Turn Paid Service, Users To Be Charged For Over 15 GB Storage Space From 1 June Next Year

In a change of its business strategy from 1 June next year, Google Inc has decided to treat high quality (HQ) compressed photos uploaded on Google photos to include in individual account holder’s storage general quota.

This means photos uploaded over and above the 15GB storage space that Google offers free will attract a fee.

For users, who want more than the 15GB of free storage that Google offers, the US IT giant will charge $1.99 a month (approximately Rs 150) under its Google 100GB One Plan.

The paid storage space can be shared with five more additional family members, said David Leib, Product Lead, Google Photos.

“This is a big change… But this only applies to newly uploaded content starting 1 June 2021. All existing HQ content remains exempt from storage quota, including uploaded between now and then (1 June 2021),” tweeted Leib.

This has resulted in over one billion people using Google Photos. They upload at least billion photos and videos every day atop four trillion that have already been uploaded.

Leib said that in order to ensure that Google Photos served the users in the long term, Google Inc has decided to align the cost of storing the photos with the primary value users enjoy by accessing the service universally.

Conceding that it would be a disappointment for many users, the Google official said that the company had worked hard to make it as “painless” as possible.

Google will still provide 15 GB of storage space free that will help 80 per cent of Google Photo users and it could serve up to three years before the storage runs out.

Google has built a tool to estimate the time by which the storage will run out space and will introduce tools to help identify and delete that users do not want to store.