Google Photos shows ‘High Quality’ images in bad light, pushes for Google One subscription

When Google introduced its Photos service half a decade ago, its major claim to fame was the ‘Unlimited’ storage space on the Google Photos cloud storage if users uploaded in ‘High Quality’ and not in ‘Original Quality’. The ‘Original Quality’ takes space from Drive. But a few months ago, Google confirmed that ‘High Quality’ photos will also start taking Drive’s space.This move indirectly pushes millions towards the subscription model for Google One. Although the search giant will be making this change in June this year, it seems to be trying hard to push users towards Google One model before they hit the end date. And this is being done by issuing quality warnings via an email.

As mentioned by Forbes, Google Photos team recently sent a mail outlining new premium editing features that will be exclusive to Google One subscribers. But what’s more interesting here is that a section in mail encourages users to use more storage quota by moving from ‘High Quality’ to ‘Original Quality’. As mentioned in the mail, “Original quality photos preserve the most detail and let you zoom in, crop and print photos with less pixelation.” While this may be true, it is claimed that Google has said something similar for the ‘High Quality’ option too in the past.

Also read: Google One app crosses 100 million installs on Play Store

Back in 2015, Google Photos creator Anil Sabharwal stated that High Quality uploads offered “near-identical visual quality” when you compare it with original photos. However, in the mail sent to users, Google’s intention seems to put High Quality photos in bad light, encouraging users to pay more for Original Quality. Also, the image used by Google to compare the quality is clearly showing ‘High Quality’ photos more pixelated. This doesn’t seem to be “near-identical visual quality” as claimed before.

These tactics may or may not work for Google. In any case, you will ultimately be moving to a paid model once your Google Photos ties up with Drive space for ‘High Quality’ images starting June this year.

So, in case you are confused if Google One is giving more cloud space for less money or is it any other platform, we have a comparison ready for you. Here, we take into account the space and price provided by Dropbox, Google One, Apple One and Microsoft Ondrive.