Google Photos compressed "High Quality" mode will irretrievably damage your photos... says Google

For more than 5 years now Google has been encouraging users to store their photos on Google Drive in its proprietary High Quality compressed mode, which allowed them to upload an unlimited number of photos to Google Drive, and keep their phone storage available by deleting the originals.

Google’s Anil Sabharwal promised that High Quality storage offered “near-identical visual quality” when compared to your original photos.

Recently, 4 trillion photos later, Google however started closing the tap on unlimited uploads to Google Drive, with users being asked to pay if they use more than 15 GB starting June 1st, 2021.

With Google having a financial incentive to get users to use up their storage and hit their storage cap, High Quality storage is suddenly not good enough for Google anymore.

In an email sent to Google Photo users advertising their new premium photo editing features, Google was also suggesting users switch from High Quality to Original Quality uploads or risk damaging their photos.

They note “Original quality photos preserve the most detail and let you zoom in, crop and print photos with less pixelation.”

The email includes the following sample photo demonstrating exactly how damaging “High Quality” compression is:

Suffice to say if High Quality compressed mode is as bad as Google suggested the company has just destroyed the memories of a billion Android users.

More likely however is that Google is being disingenuous on both ends – they should not have made overblown promises about unlimited High Quality storage in 2015 and should not be scaring users into upgrading to paid plans with unrealistic comparison pictures in 2021 either.

As a reminder – for Samsung Android users subscribing to Office 365 gives the best ultimate value, offering 1 TB of storage plus access to a wide suite of apps and services on both desktop and mobile for a low monthly fee, with the same advantages of synching with your gallery app on both desktop and mobile.

What do our readers think of Google’s latest move? Let us know below.

via Forbes