Google photo: “Dear users… the free ride is over!”
Caution
This article was published more than a year ago, there may have been developments.
Please take this into account.
Many know Google photo: the Google platform to save photos online in your Google account.
For some years now Google has introduced a data limit of 15GB for each account. This means that to keep your account free, the sum of the dimensions of mail on Gmail, file by Drive e photo saved on Photos should not exceed 15GB. There is the possibility by opening premium accounts to exceed this limit.
Later they decided to allow the unlimited saving of all image and video files on Google Photos in high quality (often lower than the original quality). The high quality is certainly lower than the original quality, but still a good compromise between quality and weight of the file. Many users joined and they synchronized the backups of mobile devices and computers through the Google Photos application. The pace of daily photo and video uploads (Google font) it's about 28 billions of files.
Those who were not satisfied with high quality were left with the option of saving photos in original quality (larger than 16MP) going to affect the 15GB of storage.
Seen the pace, in the long run unsustainable for Google, I always wondered when the service would switch-off o, more easily, the change of conditions… and here it is.
Google informs us that since 1 June 2021 (in seven months) the new high quality photos that we will upload to Photos they will be useful for reaching the maximum available quota. Anything that was uploaded before receiving the information email from Google will not be subject upon reaching 15GB.
The Google alert will remain active as the 15GB threshold is approached and from 1 June 2021 a tool will be made available that will allow the’identification and possible removal of blurred or dark photography.
For those who own a Google Pixel smartphone, however, the conditions do not change: the ability to upload photos and videos in high resolution will be guaranteed (not original) without the weight of the files affecting the achievement of 15GB.
It seems obvious that this is a maneuver by Google to push the smartphone models of its own production.
Regarding the size of the files, for some time now Google has made available a tool to check the available space and the applications that use it. We find it on the dedicated page on Google One.

Another very useful tool I used some time ago (accessible from the same page) allows you to delete unnecessary files, di sort them by size. By doing this I was able to delete several old emails with very heavy attachments and I gained several GB.

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