Google Photos Storage Is Now Officially Paid

As early as last year, Google announced that Google Cloud photos will announce a farewell to unlimited free storage on June 1, 2021. After that, users who want to store high-definition original images and uncompressed videos have to weigh the pros and cons. Last month, the company also provided a dedicated cleaning tool for Google Photos users to avoid wasting each account’s valuable 15GB cloud storage space (shared with services such as Gmail and online storage).

According to the officially promulgated policy, the content stored in the Google Photos cloud before June 2021 will not occupy the 15GB of free storage space per account. The so-called “High Quality” gear has been renamed to “Storage Saver“, but the actual function is to help users compress photos/videos to save space.

But with the end of “unsustainable” free meals, the storage of “Original” stalls will become more and more luxurious, so you’d better take the time to learn about the latest paid expansion plans.

After hitting the 15GB free storage limit, users will no longer need to upload more photos or videos to Google Photos. And because the total capacity of Drive is shared with other Google products, services including Gmail will also be affected.

If the limit is exceeded for 24 months and the account has been dormant, Google may take more stringent clean-up measures, so you must also pay attention to the official content removal notice issued at least three months in advance.

If you really want to keep your data, the current monthly fee for the package starting at 100GB is $1.99 ($19.99 per year). There is also a 200GB / 2TB large-capacity package, the monthly fee is 2.99 / 9.99 USD (annual fee 29.99 / 99.99 USD).

The good news is that users who use Google’s smartphones such as Pixel 5 and above can still continue to enjoy the unlimited free storage promise they received when they purchased the device.