Free Google Photo Now to Be Charged

Storage space of several gigabytes does not yet cost anything on the Internet. Digital pictures and videos in particular are stored on Google Photo, but also Google Drive, Microsoft One-Drive, etc.

But that will change. Every year the storage volume is growing by 8.3%. But storage is not an infinite resource. Veritas Technologies LLC explains how data can be stored intelligently and deleted by metadata.

On June 1, 2021, Google Photo will discontinue its free storage model and charge for its cloud storage. The size of images and videos has exploded due to modern smartphones and service providers are obviously no longer willing to store mass data for free. This trend will extend to other cloud storage because of the growth in all data formats. Users as well as companies are all challenged to sort data intelligently and really delete data rubbish.

Google storage: resource guzzlers are videos next to large-format images
Google is introducing its payment model, as users will continue to receive 15GB of storage for free. From 1 June 1, 2021 onwards will each newly uploaded photo or video use up these resources. However, the 15GB only seem generous at first glance, as images and videos have gained enormously in volume thanks to the rapid development of smartphones. The iPhone, for example, has been taking pictures in 1,600×1,200 pixel formats for years. In 2018, every picture with 4,032×3,024 pixels was already 3x as large and occupied an average of 3MB of memory. That would still be 5,000 pictures, which could be stored on 15GB. The big resource guzzler, however, is video. Their size depends on several factors such as resolution, frames per second or the video format. As the portal Livewire.com shows, a 60s video with 1,080p and 60 frames in HD per second already swallows 200MB . After 75 videos the memory would be full. At the highest resolution of 4K it is already 400MB, so the free memory would be exhausted at the 38th video.

For this year 2020, the photo provider Mylio, LLC expects that 1.4 trillion digital pictures will be taken worldwide, and with 7.3 trillion, almost half of these will be stored on memory. Every year this figure is growing by 8.3%. By the way, the data growth is visible in all other common data formats, be it e-mails and their attachments, Powerpoint with integrated audio and video messages or any WhatsApp exchanging animated memos, videos or audio. And modern data formats from the world of emerging industry-of-things will be no exception.

Memory is not an infinite free resource
It is only logical that free storage cannot keep up with this growth. After all, cloud storage is nothing more than someone else’s computer. It also eats up electricity, needs maintenance, software and cooling. These costs have to be refinanced and Google’s move is just one example from a number of service providers who have abandoned the freemium model. Microsoft Corp. has reduced the one-drive service to 1TB of storage, Apple, Inc. charges more than 5GB for the iCloud service, and online backup service provider Carbonite, Inc. has also switched to a payment model.

The user now has two options: He agrees to invest money for more storage, or he can decide to sort and clean up his data so as not to exhaust the free memory.

Sorting and cleaning data effectively – for the benefit of resources
Like many other unstructured documents, photos and videos in particular contain so-called metadata such as time, date and location. These data are automatically embedded in the photo file by the devices and help to transform the picture chaos into a basic structure. Even the chronological sorting allows pictures to be sorted by major events such as family celebrations or holidays. This also makes it easy to quickly find duplicates that eat up memory unnecessarily. But if you want a clean picture archive, there is no getting around looking at the data and pictures themselves. Users should therefore delete qualitatively weak, blurred, underexposed images and dozens of images of the same situation at once.

“Metadata are extremely helpful to bring order to chaos in the first step. We use this information to help companies worldwide sort their millions of documents. But in the second step, we also have to look at the data itself, as we do with photo analysis. Given the amount of data, no one or team can do this manually. This is where clever automatic analysis procedures help, using AI and ML to classify data as clearly and quickly as possible. This development, like many others in the business world, will benefit consumers who want to clean up their own memories automatically. The first image management solutions are already delivering this,” explains Eric Waltert, regional VP DACH, Veritas.