Google’s new Photos service has a lot to offer. But before you sign up, make sure you read and understand the small print.
Perhaps the biggest announcement Google made on Thursday at its I/O conference, the Photos service offers consumers the ability to store all their photos on Google’s servers for free. The service offers unlimited storage and the ability to automatically upload photos from PCs, smartphones and tablets. And photos stored in it are private by default; users have to choose to share photos via other services.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? It looks particularly good when compared with Apple’s new iCloud Photo Library, for which Apple only provides 5 gigabytes of free storage. It even looks good compared with Yahoo’s Flickr, which provides a copious 1 terabyte for free, but makes it more difficult to ensure your photos are private and limits playback of users’ videos to just three minutes.
But the Google’s new service has its own limitations.
For example, Google Photos won’t store for free pictures that are larger than 16 megapixels. If users try to store pictures that are that larger than than, Google will automatically downsize them to 16 megapixels. Likewise, Google Photos won’t store for free videos that are at resolutions greater than 1080p. As with photos, if users upload a 4K video to the service, Google will downsize it to 1080p.
What’s more, no matter what size photos or videos users upload to its free Photos service, Google will generally compress them using “lossy” compression techniques. The company says that at least with photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p, most users shouldn’t notice the difference between the compressed files and the originals, at least without zooming in super close. But the fact remains that the company will be discarding some of the data in the pictures and videos and won’t be storing the original file sizes.
The service also places some limits on the sizes of files that users can upload to it. Pictures can’t be larger than 75 megabytes or 100 megapixels. Videos can’t be larger than 10 gigabytes.
Those limitations could make the service a non-starter for prosumer photographers and videographers who shoot with high-end digital SLR cameras or 4K video cameras. But it could also give pause to average consumers who are hoping to use the service to back up files stored on their computers. Should they need to restore those pictures from Google Photos, what they download from the service won’t be exactly what they uploaded to it.
For those consumers who don’t want their photos or videos to be downsized or compressed, Google is offering another option. It has a paid version of its Photos service that promises to maintain photos and videos at their original sizes and resolutions. But for that service, consumers only get 15 gigabytes of free storage, and that space is also used to store all their other data on Google, including documents on Google Drive. If consumers want or need more space, they’ll have to pay Google’s regular rates, which start at $2 a month for 100 gigabytes.
Photo of Google Photos running on a tablet, smartphone and laptop courtesy of Google.
