Just over a year ago, Google Photos discontinued the free unlimited storage space and offers even paying users only a limited quota for their pictures and videos. Now there may be a mini-U-turn because first users now have the opportunity to use Google Photos as a bottomless pit again. Although not yet in this country, the first step has been taken.
Google Photos has many strengths, but perhaps the most important one has finally said goodbye last year: the unlimited free storage space. This is no longer offered even for paying Google One users and as of today, this only applies to owners of a pixel smartphone of the first generation. Because marketing promised it at the time, they can shovel unlimited media into the Google Photos cloud for life (lifetime of the smartphone, of course).
Now, this offer returns surprisingly, but with several buts: US users of T-Mobile will soon be able to choose from an additional Google One subscription, which brings them the same benefits as the $10 subscription, but also includes unlimited storage space on Google Photos. It is comparable to the 10 Euro subscription in this country, whose most important achievement is the 2 terabyte storage space for Google Photos, Google Drive and Gmail.
Of course, you can get by with 2 terabytes for a very long time, but even this memory could eventually fill up with power users and then have to be exchanged for a higher subscription. That’s exactly why there is the 15 dollar subscription with the same conditions but just the additional Google Photos barrel, which in this case again has no bottom and absorbs everything you throw in.
So if you are willing to spend another 5 dollars per month, you can look forward to the old scheme again. What’s more, the whole thing applies not only to photos in high quality but in the original size. This is an offer that had previously only been available in this form for Pixel users. $5 isn’t much, but it’s not a little either. I think some people will be torn between whether this is a necessary offer.
The price question is whether you need the NOW at all. Because if Google Photos suddenly consumes 0 bytes of storage space again, what do you do with the remaining 2 TB? I’m certainly not alone in the fact that Google Photos is by far the biggest memory hog from the Trio Drive Photos Gmail. Thus, this T-Mobile offer only becomes attractive when you are about to exceed the 2 TB limit.
It’s only accessible to T-Mobile users and also only in the U.S. and the unlimited contingent can’t be shared with family. But it could be a test run by Google of how something like this is received. It cannot be ruled out that such a thing will be offered to all Google One users worldwide if it is successful.