Gone are the days of abundance when you could copy as many photos as you want into the Google Photos app. This digital shelter he uses Over one billion users, It will automatically continue to dump photos and videos for people who have installed it on their smartphone. But from 1he is In June, an unpleasant small counter will start: any new photo or video will be deducted from 15 gigabytes (GB) of storage, which can only be extended by paying for a subscription to the Google service.
To live this transition as safely as possible, Google Announced six months agoIt is better to have some small checks before this date.
Very likely in the long term, but uncertain in the short term. The 15GB free storage reserve for photos and videos is fairly generous: it can contain thousands of photos. If you use Google Photos, you can check how full your storage space is At this address.
Be careful though: even if the scale is less than a third, you unfortunately aren’t necessarily out of the woods to keep using the app for free for a long time. It will all depend on how many photos you produce each month.
Currently, for many users, the saved images don’t take up any space in Google Photos, because they actually don’t count when choosing an unlimited storage option oddly called “high-quality storage” – while precisely prescribing … reduction in quality and compression.
All of these images will be able to continue storing for free in the app. And this is just 1he is June, any new image will be deducted from 15 GB available for free for everyone, regardless of their quality (Except for rare Google Pixel smartphone users). For photo lovers who often take pictures with their phones and use Google Photos as an unlimited storage solution for a slight compression, the fill scale may increase at a rapid rate.
-
How do you do housework?
Depending on your usage, Google can give you an estimate of the time remaining before the 15GB saturation, thanks Very straightforward online tool. If you want to confirm this estimate by calculating yourself, know that a gigabyte of space holds an average of 300 photos or ten minutes of video. According to Google, the majority of users who don’t pay for storage will not face saturation concerns for three years.
However, it is best to do this in advance to prevent problems from occurring. The most pressing question is: Are all your photos stored “in high quality” in Google Photos, and therefore not counting from 15 GB? This is not certain: Google’s settings lack clarity, and some users in the past have chosen to set in “original quality” without realizing that their photos will then be deducted from the free 15GB storage. Others have, over time, been able to mix the formats – high quality and original quality – by switching from one mobile phone to another.
Those who chose to mix formats have until May 31st to convert their collection to “high quality” in order to reduce the space occupied.
They can change their minds until May 31 and switch their entire set of images to “high quality” by simply clicking “Restore Storage”. At this address. Perhaps this will allow them to free up several gigabytes: these photos will stop being deducted from their space. But from 1he is June, as the new terms of use go into effect, that advice will be gone forever. It will no longer allow pictures to be subtracted from counting, but only to reduce the space they occupy.
To free up more space, it will be necessary to resort to a more traditional solution: the main cleaning of the springs. Google offers A tool that allows you to view and delete The heaviest photos and videos – which can come in handy if you choose to save the affected photos elsewhere. The tool is simple and well designed enough to reduce the risk of accidental deletion. In the coming days, the company will provide a second tool to identify dark or faded images, and then remove them.
It is also possible to save space by getting rid of very heavy emails or documents His Google account : Google Photos storage is already shared with Google Drive and Gmail. Google progressed there again Effective tools For sorting heavy documents and emails. More radical: You can completely empty Google Drive and replace it with competing online storage, to take up a little more space.
Google makes migrating easier by allowing you to restore all backed up files In a few clicks, by just checking the Drive box. The last solution is only possible when you are not using Google Office suite and content is using Google Drive as primary storage space.
-
If I prefer paying, is there a solution other than Google?
Paying is the easiest solution: You won’t have to do housework for long. But if you really had to loosen up the bag, should you trust Google or opt for another photo and video storage service? You will hardly find an offer cheaper than Google’s paid first offer, which charges € 20 per year for 100GB of space.
But some will notice that the company is not without blame when it comes to privacy. The Google It is currently certifying that it is not using your photos to retrieve information About you, and customize the ads that he can display. But will that commitment be maintained forever, when the company mainly lives on distributing targeted ads?
If this concern is central to you, we recommend taking a look Competitive View from Certainafe. If you decide to migrate, you will be able to recover all photos and videos hosted on Google photos At this address By clicking on “Export your data”.
-
How about manual backups?
You can store your photos yourself, for example by copying pictures from your smartphone to a file the computer. But this has two drawbacks: The transfer is painful, especially since it is recommended to repeat it regularly to check as few photos as possible in case the phone is stolen. In addition, it is better to save pictures in two places because all memories are fallible and in case of failure the pictures disappear.
If you entrust an online storage service with your photos, then do not worry about malfunctions of memory devices: with their use, everything is stored in duplicate. There are several solutions for saving your photos yourself. The simplest is to connect your mobile phone to a computer and extract the latest images. Then it may be copied to one (or more) external hard drives.
There are automatic backup solutions. The easiest way is to connect a personal cloud hard drive to your Wi-Fi network, like Western Digital’s My Cloud Home Duo, which unfortunately costs (from € 400). Experts may prefer to entrust their personal cloud to NAS, which is an expensive and more complicated network storage system to use, but richer in possibilities.
