Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the blog post [0]: > Any photos or videos you’ve uploaded in High quality before June 1, 2021 will not count toward your 15GB of free storage. If this is a concern you personally have, take a look at this help page: https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?h... Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on any of this stuff. [0] - https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
This helps me personally a little bit, but it's sad to see that going forward the world will need to find a new way to organize & make available their visual media, especially after death. Today marks a new era, where linkrot- of many of our most treasured things- will be a much more personal & unfortunate seeming inevitability.
>What happens when you're inactive
When you have been inactive in a product for 2 years, we may delete all content for that product. But before we do that, we will:
Give you notice using email and notifications within the Google products. We will contact you at least three months before content is eligible for deletion.
Give you the opportunity to avoid deletion (by becoming active in the product)
Give you the opportunity to download your content from our services.
Important: As an example, if you're inactive for 2 years in Photos, but still active in Drive and Gmail, we will only delete Google Photos content. Content in Gmail and Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) will not be deleted if you are active in those products.
That is pretty concerning for anyone who believed that, in the event of their death, their Google Photos archive would still be around for their surviving friends and family to enjoy.