GOOGLE PHOTO ENDS UNLIMITED STORAGE
You’ll have to start paying from next June
GOOGLE IS to start charging for Google Photos from May 31 if you want to store more than the free 15GB that comes with every Google account (which is shared by Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos). Currently images uploaded at high compression don’t count towards the total. Only Google Pixel owners will be excluded from the new deal. Why the change? Because free unlimited storage is an open invitation for people to fill countless rackmounted hard drives with pictures of their cat. Google claims that 28 billion images and videos are uploaded every week, and that the total number of photos has topped 4,000,000,000,000. One piece of good news is that anything added before the new policy kicks in won’t count, so if you do have a huge library of images you won’t have to find it a new home, or start paying. There are other changes at Google Drive too: From June next year all documents will count towards your quota—every Google Doc, Sheet, Slide, Form, etc. Existing files are exempt, but only if you don’t edit them.