Google Photos is one of the best services that Google offered to date. The service got a lot of attention and popularity when Google, being generous to some extent, let users back up unlimited photos online for free. The bad news is, Google will not be offering unlimited free photo backups from June 1, 2021.
The Basic Idea
The idea of Google photo was to let everyone upload their photos to the cloud under a Google account. Users will be able to access them anytime anywhere just by logging in to their accounts. Initially, photos with Original Quality had to maintain a quota, but if users wanted to have unlimited and free backups then one had to agree with High-Quality images. Thus Google Photos became extremely popular, as you know how much people like to take pictures of literally anything these days and preserve them for nothing. Maybe Google realized that fact later or this might be a marketing trap to lock users with the Google ecosystem.
The Announcement
Last year in November, Google made the announcement. The policy will be implemented soon on June 1, 2021. However, every photo you upload before 31st May of 2021, will not be taken to account. You can upload as many photos as you want before the time runs out. Is that even a real solution?
Plausible Solutions
Speaking of solutions to this issue, The Pixel 4 came with 3 years of a free scheme of Original Quality photo uploads in Google Photos. Furthermore, every current pixel device will have a free and unlimited backup scheme of High-Quality photos, to be specific. Spoiler alert if you are planning to buy a Google Pixel next time, future Pixels will not get such generous treatment from Google, because for the time being, Google decided that.
This leads to the second solution, which is getting a subscription to Google One. Pay Google to lend you some space. This is to some extent a fair deal. You can get 100GB for $1.99/month or $19.99/year. There are plans for 200 GB and 2TB as well for $2.99/month and $9.99/month respectively. Get a subscription and upload as many pictures as you want of anything, that will be totally worthy.
If you are not into paying but more into wanting free photo backups. Option three is here with a 100GB free backup plan with Degoo. Samsung has a liaison with the company as a result Samsung offered 100GB of free storage and a few Samsung smartphones had this App pre-installed in them as well. Degoo is a growing social platform focusing mainly on Photo backup and cloud storage. Obviously, there are other alternatives like Mega, pCloud, Amazon Photos, and so on but everyone has a limit of 5GB-15GB. Apart from these, you can buy expandable storages like SD Cards or Portable Hard drives. There are a lot of better deals out there.
Wrapping Up
Discontinuing the unlimited photo backup plan hurt a lot of users and mostly photoholics. Nevertheless, If you upload 200 HD photos of a piece of cake that ate last day on Google Photo and do the same more or less every day, then that is ridiculous and not an efficient use of service regardless of whether that is free or paid. Google had to be harsh or maybe it is another strategy of their business. There is a saying, “When a door closes, another opens”; as such maybe something else will cheer everything up. Let’s look forward and be positive.
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