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Today during Google’s IO keynote, it unveiled the long-rumored standalone photos service, Google Photos. The biggest perk of the new standalone app isn’t all of the cool new features Google unveiled for Photos, but rather the fact that the service will offer unlimited cloud storage of all your photos and videos. That’s a huge departure from services like Apple’s iCloud, which only offers 5GB of space for free.
So what’s the catch with the free unlimited space? Any pictures that are over 16MP will be compressed. You’ll also be able to store 1080p videos for free, but any 4K recording you take with your phone will be downsized on the service as well.
If you’re a photographer who doesn’t want to opt into the free option with compression, when you install the app you’ll be able to choose the “original” Google Photos option. This will store all of your photos and videos that you select at the original resolution, but you’ll need premium Google Drive space. For $10 a month, you can get 1TB of space for all your uncompressed photo and video needs.
For everyone else, backing up and finding your photos just became a whole lot easier.
UPDATE: It’s live!
win
SCORE!! biggest announcement IMO
I approve!
I feel a tingling sensation in my pants…
Major win.
So i can go store all my movies for free? All 25GB?
yeaph , you ll just propably have to trick it to auto-upload it for you
I’ve got my cheeks clinched right now on how excited I am. But my conspiracy self is questioning why they’re doing all this for free.
Living in my oblivious bubble of security and positive thoughts, I’m going with, cause it’s Google and they can. Meaning, there’s ad revenue to be had somewhere in here. We just haven’t found it yet.
Because they make their money from mass media analytics.
What about existing photos and videos that were talking up storage space on drive? Will they be taken off of your storage list?
SO….once compressed theres no catch to decompress? Does it take an extremely long time to do so, will we need a specific app to decompress. It sounds appealing but I mean what benefit does Google have storing all our content?? Is there a server room with storage drives that are sitting around doing nothing and out of the kindness of this companies heart decided to go Free unlimited, I dont think that is the case though I do think thats what they want us to believe. Anyone have any ideas or facts as to how this whole operation will work out for Google and the users that store their photos and videos? Shout Out!
#NSA
#MoreAds
#FaceDetection to push ads to unsuspecting users
#Illuminati
#TrustIssues??
#ImAConspiracyNut!
The compression is lossy so there’s no way to go back to the original unless you have it stored somewhere else. It’s also pretty safe to assume that any free service comes with a loss of privacy. :)
2 reasons why I won’t use their service – free or otherwise. We live in an ad-driven for-profit money-hungry world. Google isn’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart – money is what drives them and they want your data and then have you use all of their services. Has anyone taken a look at the sheer number of Android Google services that are forced into your Android phone when you use Google Services? It’s huge. Google has already become big brother and a big monopoly just like Microsoft and Apple – hopefully to their ultimate demise. We need to stand up and fight for our freedoms including privacy and the right to install, uninstall, and use whatever we want on the web anytime, anywhere, anyplace and never be forced by the big-brother police. Take a look at what Google “allows” and “doesn’t allow” on their Google Play apps store. Google is joining the ranks of companies that want to control every aspect of your life – all for profit – forever as long you live.
awesome. thanks google
Is this app available now?
Yep!
Is this amount of compression any different than what Google plus has always done with photos?
I might actually start using my phone to take more pictures now.
What are they exactly going to compress? JPEG already compressed even above 16MP, did they mean RAW format?
I suspect they will resize it to fewer pixels, then recompress.
It seems like application software that stored images of colored squares (like 4×4 pixel blocks) could effectively present that storage as an unlimited ‘hard drive’ to store files into. Each image could be a large ‘sector’. The file names could be the sector numbers. Map a file system on top, and instant unlimited, but slow cloud storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Not exactly what you’re describing, but similar.
Good things but bye bye privacy google will scann all your pictures for serve you ads remember nothing is free everything have cost and when is free guest what you are the product.
16 MB is HUGE!
MP, not MB ;) it’s the size that for example an S5 can take.
so continue to use my unlimited one drive then?
Automatic compression and quality loss… yet another reason to avoid the cloud.
Even 12 MP photos get compressed. I uploaded a few yesterday and a 3.5 meg picture was around 1.7 or so when downloaded. I wasn’t able to tell the difference between the two unless I zoomed way in and saw a few edges softened.