When Google launched its Google Photos cloud storage, not to be confused with the app of the same name, it was hailed as the best way to save space on your phone and preserve your digital memories almost forever. It came with a very generous offer of almost unlimited photo storage space, as long as they loaded only in high quality. Nothing lasts forever, as they say, and it looks like Google is revising its previous statements in favor of taking up more space for a Google One subscription.
To be fair, Google has the right to change any policy or feature it has, within reason and with prior notice, of course. He also did not make quantifiable statements for a reason, leaving some things open for interpretation and subject to change as needed.
Half a decade ago, Google claimed that high-quality photos had visual quality almost identical to the original quality. The goal at that time was to encourage users to compress their original photos to take advantage of Google Photo’s unlimited storage offering. As of June 1 this year, however, even high-quality photos will count towards your cloud storage and you will easily reach your 15 GB quota without paying for an extra storage subscription.
Google is now reportedly sending emails that are actually trying to get Google Photos users to upload even higher quality photos instead of high quality. The image above compares the difference between the Original (left) and High (right) qualities, clearly showing a visual quality that is not nearly identical. Since high-quality uploads exclude original phone quality photos by default, this means that you may be causing irreversible damage to the original photos.
On the one hand, this may not be representative of all high quality photos and some users may not even be able to notice the difference most of the time. On the other hand, these changes have left some people suspicious of Google’s hidden reason for making people now pay for more Google Drive storage after pinning them to Google Photos years ago.