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Say goodbye to unlimited storage for Google Pixel 3 (at original quality, that is)

By Doroteya Borisova

Updated: Feb 01, 2022, 2:18 PM

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Google

For the first three of its phones, Google had once offered a special perk that set it apart from every other competitor on the market: unlimited media storage at original quality. That is, until today.

Starting Tuesday, February 1, 2022, that particular selling point becomes history. Any photos uploaded at their original quality from now on, will be counted towards users' limited free storage allotment of 15 gigabytes.

The Pixel, Pixel 2, and Pixel 3 devices (and their XL counterparts) all originally allowed users to back up an unlimited amount of photos, as well as 4K video, without compressing or formatting them in any way to cut down on the used space. Users would be able to access any of these photos at any point in time, without having to uncompress them first.

Realistically, keeping this a lifelong perk would have been anything but sustainable for Google's business. With millions of users each backing up hundreds—or thousands—of gigabytes' worth of media onto their Google devices, that much data can get pretty pricey pretty quickly.

In fact, when Google announced the end of unlimited photo storage at original quality in 2020, it had over a billion users, 4 trillion photos in the cloud already, and 28 billion images uploaded on a weekly basis.

But fret not: you can still back up media for free in 'storage saver' quality

Yesterday may have marked the end of an era, but Google hasn't taken away that privilege entirely. Users can still back up a technically unlimited number of photos to the cloud, albeit a formatted version of them. The Google Photos support page states:

You get unlimited storage in Original quality at no charge for all photos and videos backed up to Google Photos from Pixel 3 through Jan 31, 2022. Photos and videos backed up on or before that date will remain in Original quality at no charge. After January 31, 2022 new photos and videos will be backed up in Storage saver quality (previously named High quality) at no charge. Photos and videos backed up in Original quality will count toward your Google Account storage.

This means that any images backed up from today forward, can only be saved for free in the "Storage Saver" quality specified by Google—which once used to be "high quality." Storage Saver quality compresses the photos and videos, making them take up less space, and allowing Google to continue offering one of its biggest original Pixel perks in a slightly more limited way.