Google has announced a major change in its storage policy for Google Photos, and will begin tracking the number of photographs and movies stored up to your free 15GB storage space starting Tuesday, June 1. Here’s all you need to know and do about the recent policy change.

Google Photos
Google Free Storage upto 15 GB

Google, which provides 15GB free storage to every Google account, announced the modification to its Google Photos storage policy late last year.

According to the new policy, “high quality” images that weren’t counted in the 15GB storage until now, will also be included in the data starting next week. Google is also renaming the ‘High quality storage tier’ as ‘Storage saver’.

If a user exceeds the free storage and still needs more space, Google One provides 100GB storage at the subscription costs of Rs 130 per month or Rs 1,300 per year. A 200GB cloud storage option is also available, which costs Rs 210 per month or Rs 2,100 per year.

You’ll have to pay Rs 650 per month and Rs 6,500 per year for 2TB of storage. It costs Rs 3,250 per month for 10TB. You may even share storage space with family members, or store it in your phone if you have high internal storage, or create another Gmail account and store the photos there.

Meanwhile, if you don’t want to pay extra bucks for storing your photos, you can take these steps before June 1 to ensure more space.

  • All ‘high-quality’ pictures get unlimited storage till June 1, which means you can add as many ‘high quality’ images as you want to Google Photos for now by then without impacting your 15GB storage.
  • You can convert your ‘original quality’ images to ‘high quality,’ in order to use existing space and ensure that it won’t be counted in your free storage after June 1.
  • You can remove the duplicate, blurred, and other unrequired pictures to create more space. 
  • The 15GB storage space is shared across Google Drive and Gmail as well, so you should get rid of unnecessary data on these services as well.

While changing its storage policy, Google Photos is introducing a new feature that will help you manage your storage by showing you how much storage has been utilised and how to free up space by deleting photographs.

The programme also has settings to categorise blurry photographs, screenshots, long movies, and other photographs that you might want to review. You can access the function through Account Settings in Google Photos > Back up and Sync settings > Manage Storage. 

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P.S. You won’t be affected by the new storage policy if you have a Pixel 5 or older version. Users of Google’s Pixel phones will continue to have access to an unlimited amount of free storage.