It appears Google has changed its mind today, after five years of promising that high-quality downloads in Google Photos provide "near-identical visual quality" compared to your original photos.
In a recent email to subscribers, the Google Photos team announced new premium photo editing features available exclusively to subscribers to the paid Google One plan and hinted that the original quality photos preserve the most detail and let you zoom, crop, and print photos with less pixelation compared to the high-quality ones that may be damaged during cropping or zooming, accompanied by a picture that shows the exact amount of damage to "high quality" compression.
This picture means two things: Either that Google has been lying to users for the past five years after it promised them that high-quality images are a better option than the original images because it allows users to store unlimited images for free while consuming less storage space and even Google invited users to delete their original photos from their device to free up space after storing them in the high-quality on Google Photos, or that Google just wants users to use more space to fill in the 15 GB which is giving them free to push them to pay more storage as part of their Google One plan, which I think seems more realistic than the first hypothesis, giving the fact that Google has already ended last November the unlimited Google Photos uploads and announced that starting June 1st,2021, any new photos or videos that users upload after that date will count toward the 15 GB storage that Google gives everyone free.
Google is not the only one doing this, Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi, and even Microsoft counts the space of photos and videos in the backup copy within the free space it provides for free to users, but at least it does not promise users any unlimited, free, high-quality storage for their photos and videos, and insist on them to delete their original photos, then says to them after that, congratulations, you have been deceived, and the pictures we have in the clouds are in low quality and unclear.
So what do you think of this move by Google? Let us know in the comments section below.
