Google Photos to retract Free and Unlimited Storage

Google is about to take away the free and unlimited photo backup on Google Photos from June 1st onwards. Google will still be providing the 15GB backup space provided as default for all its users. The users will have to compromise the quality of their pictures while uploading or get Google One subscription to get a cloud storage facility.

Google will limit free storage only for photos up to a specific resolution. Each photo you upload would reduce the storage space accordingly. You can download your precious photos to your computer so as not to lose any of them before buying Google storage space.

If you would like to download all your photos together, you could use Google’s Takeout. Google Takeout lets you take out all the user data stored in different Google platforms. You can log in to your google account on the website takeout.google.com and create a new export to download your data.

If you like to download only photos, you could select photos alone in the checklist provided while you click the ‘create a new export’ button. You can either directly download the entire collection or can download selected albums by clicking ‘all photo albums included’. Next, you can select the export options provided by Google.

You can either receive a download link on your mail or transfer the data into another cloud storage facility like Box, Dropbox etc. Google also provides an option to select the size of the file exported i.e. if you have 10 GB of photos if you select the file size a 2 Gb where Google would make five files of 2 GB size each and send it to your mail once you click the ‘Create Export’ button.

If you like to download the images one at a time, you can go to photos.google.com and log in. Then open the image that you wish to download and click the three dots at the top right corner and click download.

You can also select a bunch of images and download them together using the same method. While this would take more time and effort, it is more efficient as you could avoid downloading those photos that you do not want. If the user has arranged their photos into albums, they can download one album at a time also.

Go to the ‘View All Album’ section, click one album, then the three-dot menu and download all. If you are downloading a bunch of images together or an album, you might get the file in the form of a zip file.