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The farewell to Google Photos’ unlimited free storage in ‘High Quality’ is one of the technological innovations of the year, for what it means for the millions of people that Google has bragged about having at various events. Millions of people who, according to the company, 28,000 million photos and videos are uploaded to the service every week.
Google Photos It’s much more than a free Google service for many people, it’s “a salvation”. Unlike the platforms we use to consume content and to which we can contribute, such as YouTube or Instagram, Google Photos is a life insurance for many people who don’t want to worry about connecting their mobile to their PC to download photos, or who know it. When faced with a damaged or stolen smartphone, all your photos will already be uploaded to the cloud.
More than 1 billion users later, Google says it needs to charge for the service to improve Google Photos
Google has explained little of the reasons that led to this change of course with Photos, but he argued that everything is done by power by improving service. In the background, it suggests that it has to do with cost, meaning that too many photos have already been uploaded for the service to remain free. However, in another of its large services it has not yet imposed restrictions.
Google will continue to allow free photo uploads wherever the user continues to create value
The news was totally unexpected, but Google taking the plunge right now makes sense. Google doesn’t usually lose money on its services and if they’re free it’s for something. During these five years of unlimited free uploads to Google Photos, the company has amassed massive amounts of photos and metadata that probably served to train its AI in facial or stage recognition better than anyone else. dataset possible.
Thanks to this, it has one of the best face or object-based photo search services on the market, which didn’t come without serious bugs, which have been fixed. Before, all the functions of Photos were an addition, but now they will be a claim for us to pay for their storage instead of other alternatives that still don’t have a similar capacity in many sections. Google Photos has helped Google so much as users, and when it is complete enough, it changes its business model. Legitimate.
Wherever the user continues to create value for Google services, there are no changes in Mountain View. It’s something we can see on Google Maps, where millions of photos are uploaded (and displayed) too, but where no changes have been announced. And the thing might be balanced: Google may charge for Google Photos and Docs but pay the user for contributing good content to maps, whatever the type. Instead, they provide rewards that today cannot offset the new cost of their storage and productivity services.
The strategy with Photos and Google+ has stifled the competitors
As we have seen, Google’s strategy with Photos has been able to leave great advantages on a technical and user knowledge level. But what happened to your little competitors? Apple and Amazon go in the opposite direction, but when Google+ started providing unlimited uploads with compression there were more competing startups on the market that no longer exist.
After stifling startups with free storage and making them less attractive, Google will now do what it did before: charge for a good cloud service.
Picturelife is one of the best known cases. It was a highly regarded service, along with others like Everpix or Loom, which was purchased and said goodbye 18 months later, in August 2016. After four years of trying to compete, it reached 220,000 subscribers, of which it archived 200 million photos. But looking from you to Google, Apple and Amazon (with unlimited photo uploads for Prime users since 2014) was starting to be impossible.
It also seems noteworthy that Google’s free photo storage has helped drive tons of startups out of this market: Everpix, Loom, Ever, Picturelife. Now that they’re gone and Google is tired of losing money on Photos, the change in revenue changes.
– Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 11, 2020
Jonathan Benassaya, creator of Picturelife, told The Verge at the time of farewell how difficult the situation had been in the last few months. “Nobody is interested in cloud storage anymore“He said in connection with the arrival of more investors. And when a giant offers the same (or rather, thanks to its computing power) as you, it’s impossible to resist. It’s the same story as social networks. Facebook and its apps they killed almost everything.
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