Google photo album has recently updated its terms of service. The free capacity limit for users to upload high-quality photos is 15GB. If you exceed this limit, you need to pay for it.
What does this behavior of Google mean? Why was it free before and now it is charged? What kind of negative impact does its behavior have on other companies? Is Google still the Google that wants to be useful? Let’s dig deeper.
Why You should pay for google photos now?
For five years, Google Photos has been known for providing unlimited and free ‘high-quality’ compressed image storage services. However, Google announced on Wednesday, November 11 that it would cancel the free policy, starting on June 1 next year.
Any new photos uploaded by users, whether in original or high-quality images, will occupy 15GB of free storage space (high-quality photos that have been uploaded before are not subject to this restriction).
If the size of your uploaded photos exceeds 15GB, then you must subscribe to the Google One cloud storage service to unlock more storage space.
But from another point of view, this is undoubtedly an irritating inducement turn. It is a monopolistic behavior of large technology companies.
We can say that unlimited free storage services are the biggest selling point of Google Photos, and almost no competitors can match it. In the past, Google was willing to let people use this feature for free, in exchange for profits for people to upload a large number of photos, to assist in training their own algorithms; through free, it can also attract users to stay in the Google software ecosystem.
Now, when Google Photos has attracted more than 1 billion users, it has become an indispensable part of their digital life (migrating data to another software is too troublesome).
