If you have missed the news, here's a quick overview
- Currently, Google Photos allows storage of unlimited high-quality photos and videos on your cloud.
- Only original quality media counts toward the 15GB free storage.
- Beginning June 2021, high-quality photos and videos too will start counting towards your storage quota.
- Media uploaded till June 2021 will remain available for free.
- Pixel users will not be affected by this.
We knew this was coming, primarily because of the volume of photos and videos that get uploaded daily. As Google claims, 28 billion photos and videos are uploaded every week. Google had to decide on this, the question was just when.
Google Photos wasn't a charity, it had its purpose
IMO, the purpose of google photos in being free was to train its AI and computer vision based on the real-world photos and videos and Google Photos is their most dependable source for these datasets. If you have keenly observed, Google Photos as a product has had significant improvements over the years. It's been 5 years, even if the models aren't perfect yet, they already have ample data to train them better.
This reminds me of a famous quote,
If you're not paying for it, you're the product
Now that we aren't the product anymore, the focus shifts to the actual product Google one
Promoting Google One
Google one - the subscription service was waiting for this move. Over these years, a substantial number of people would have been so used to the ecosystem that they would rather subscribe for the service instead of finding an alternative and migrate everything. This is a potential business model. Providing 100GB for less than 2$ is a pretty neat deal too especially with google's family sharing features. Most of the users would not even have a second thought over subscribing it right away.
Yet another typical product
In hindsight, Google could have easily done this years ago but as usual, it went with that typical product philosophy, "First, get the user to the ecosystem, iterate and provide quality service, keep them happy, make it difficult for the user to leave the ecosystem, now charge for the service". I feel Google Photos has passed the test with flying colours. Now is the time for Google Photos to reap the rewards for all the hard work.
Btw, ICYMI Amazon Photos provides unlimited storage for its prime users. Heard that somewhere before?😉
I'd be expecting your views on this too.
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