Google's November announcement that it would stop offering unlimited photo storage next year may not have an immediate impact on many users, but it's still left some disappointed people who didn't see it coming.
Google Photos, which stores images in the cloud, has become a favorite app, in part because of its ability to easily delete photos from our smartphones to free up space without a physical computer. But perhaps the service’s biggest draw — its unlimited free storage for “high” quality photos — is going away on June 1, 2021.
“To welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future, we’re changing our unlimited High Quality storage policy,” Shimrit Ben-Yair, Google’s vice president of photos, wrote in a Nov. 11 blog post announcing the changes. She also noted that the change will allow the company to “keep pace with growing storage demand.”
Google Photos has become incredibly popular, with the company estimating that users have uploaded 4 trillion photos to the service. People upload a whopping 28 billion photos and videos per week.