In case you haven’t heard, Google Photos is changing. Come June 1, the free unlimited photo and video backup tool will no longer be completely free. Ahead of that though, Google has introduced a new tool aimed squarely at saving precious storage space to help you cope with the change. It’s called Manage storage and it finds photos that you might not be particularly crazy about, so you can delete them instantly.
This tool can be accessed from the Back & sync section of the Google Photos settings menu. Clicking on it shows you how much time you have left to exhaust your free storage, based on your photography habits. But down below are the tools that matter. This is where blurry photos, large videos, and screenshots will be isolated for you to look at and decide whether to delete them and save up on some storage.
This is a great tool but it’s of no use at the moment, since anything uploaded to Google Photos prior to June 1 will continue to count against your free storage. However, after the date, it will come incredibly handy for those who wish to keep using the free storage option for as long as they can. Another small change has also made its way into the service. The High quality storage tier has been renamed Storage saver without any changes to the way it stores your photos and videos.
To give you a quick refresher, after June 1, Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage setting and start counting all your uploads against the Storage saver tier, which offers 15GB of space that’s shared with your Gmail, and Google Drive as well. Pixel users will be exempt from this change, but all their uploads will be switched to Storage saver instead of Original quality.