For the privacy-minded, it's better to ask users to simply pay for a service than monetize their data with ads and more. Some people see where Google is coming from. That didn't stop his replies from filling up with frustrated customers. In a hand-wringing Twitter thread, David Lieb, the product head of Google Photos, announced the change, and tried to show all the ways Google was easing the blow. These palliatives, however, did not stem the tide of mass-bemoaning that occurs whenever a tech company decides it's time to pay for something that was previously free. That cap also includes data from Gmail and Google Drive. As for the price of storage, users can get 100GB of storage for $1.99/month. Google also points out that it has features to help you manage storage (like identifying blurry photos or large video files you might want to delete), and has a tool (opens in a new tab) to estimate your data needs.

It won't go into effect until next June, and all of the media you've previously uploaded won't count against the 15GB limit - only new uploads. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides will begin counting toward data limits, and Google will also start automatically deleting data from inactive accounts.

The move appears to be part of a larger effort by Google (opens in a new tab) to tamp down on - or at least make money on - the massive amount of data it stores. Once you eclipse that amount, it's time to pay up. Beginning June 1, 2021, any new hi-res photos stored in Google Photos will count against the service's limit of 15GB of free data. Google announced Wednesday (opens in a new tab) that Google Photos would no longer allow unlimited high-quality photo and video storage for its previous price of free-99 (h/t The Verge (opens in a new tab)).

The era of free cloud photo storage, that is.

Google photos storage