A few more days, or rather a few hours and the convenience of having all the photos taken with your smartphone stored in the digital drawer of Google Photos or the ability to manually download the original photos in high quality recompressed format, without any limitation and without occupying precious GB of storage space, will fail. As of June 1 (widely communicated in recent months and recalled by the Mountain View giant in a recent), in fact, the service will continue to take photos and videos but to do this, it will occupy the free space in the 15 GB cloud reserved for each BigG user.
In essence, the rules for using the app launched in 2015 and becoming one of the most adopted ever for managing photos, both in the Android and iOs environment, are changing. Rules that Google has occasionally detailed: high quality and standard quality content will be counted in the storage space of your account and once the free storage limit is reached, you can subscribe to Google One to activate space additional memory or delete content and continue with the free storage option. On the other hand, anyone who is inactive for 24 months or more on Drive, Gmail and Photos could have their account deleted, resulting in the loss of stored data. Good news, however, for those who have a Pixel smartphone in their pocket (series 1 to 5), who will be granted unlimited use of Photos even after the deadline, if only for the photos and videos that will be saved at from your device.
The costs of the paid service
Those who decide to store their content in Google Photos must therefore take into account to spend € 1.99 per month while remaining within the 100 GB bar, while to go up to 200 GB or even 2 terabytes it will take 2.99 and 2 terabytes respectively. 9.99 euros per month. . Considering the deadline, here is the first useful information for users: Any high-resolution images uploaded before June 1 will not count towards the 15GB limit, and it might be a good time to order your photo collections and move (or copy) them online.
New tools available in the application
To avoid losing precious memories and make it easier for all users of the service, Google has announced the availability of certain (free) tools that will surely help its customers. Within the app, for example, a special tool will highlight photos and videos that might be deleted due to their poor quality or because they are simple screenshots so as not to occupy unnecessarily a precious space. Also from the application, it will also be possible to view a personalized estimate of the time it will take before consuming the available 15 GB: an algorithm will analyze the frequency with which you save photos and videos, the quantity of downloaded images. each time and all other files related to the Google account. According to the first estimates published by the company, 80% of the users of the service currently have a useful space for at least three years. Finally, with the change of Photo’s skin, the function which allows to save photos and videos in “space saving” mode will be renamed: “Excellent Quality” will be replaced by “Storage Saver” but in fact its peculiarities remain the same. .
With Android 12 stop the automatic loading of screenshots
The new life of Google Photos will also find concrete with the launch of the new version of the operating system of the green robot. In fact, during the recent Google I / O, two changes were anticipated that should resolve some functional flaws in the service on Android devices. The first concerns the automatic downloading of screenshots in the cloud in the cloud space, which the application engine retrieves in the “Dcim” folder of the smartphone, by automatically saving the photos. To eliminate the risk of possible violations of images containing passwords or other personal information uploaded online or to reduce the space occupied by unnecessary items, Android 12 will direct the storage of screenshots in a different path and dedicated, avoiding that they can be mixed with the photographic roller. The user will then choose whether or not to save this folder to Google Photos. The other novelty concerns the management of access permissions to local files of the new software, which will also allow applications such as Google Photos to delete photos and videos in a single request, without having to confirm this operation twice (such as this is happening today).
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