Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021

For anyone with a technical inclination, we knew this day would come eventually, thus Google did as well. But for the layman or casual user, one would assume the unlimited space would remain free forever. Companies really need to be upfront about the sustainability of their free options and the forecasting of when those things will change. Google had to have known that they couldn't sustain an unlimited free plan forever and should have stated such from the beginning.

I'm glad they're giving notice with more than 6 months before the change, but it still feels scummy.

Tldr: low quality but unlimited storage is expensive, so it will go away in June. However everything uploaded before will not use space for some time. High quality storage has never been unlimited so no changes.

A Google Photos storage policy update I would love to read is some guarantee that I can download a backup of my photos if my Google account gets blocked for some reasons.

TLDR: unlimited high quality photos going away. Will start counting against your storage quota.

Huh, I wonder if Google will also fix their incredibly bad "Backup and Sync" program for MacOS, which over the years has added thousands of copies of every photo on my Mac into Google Photos, making photos virtually useless to me and presumably racking up the virtual disk usage of my account. I'm happy to pay for storage but seriously this is one of the worst programs I have ever encountered.

Wow. What a disappointment.

I started saving my photos with Google for two reasons: - I’m an iPhone user and didn’t want a single company to have access to all my assets, - it was free and this compensated for the discomfort of using a non-native app.

Without the second argument it makes total sense to look at other, more privacy-oriented providers. Since Apple tries to rebrand itself this way, I would expect more former customers to go there.