Google Photos is one of their most amazing products...I've been a very happy user for years. It's so good, it's just the most obvious choice for any casual photographer. No crazy upsells, great performance, good feature set.

I recently realized that a lot of my favorite photos are backed up to Google and...that's it! Folks get their accounts closed with no explanation and no recourse, though. So I used Google Takeout to try and get a copy of my photos for safe-keeping. The request took two days to fulfill, and resulted in 39 archives, each 2GB, with no reasonable way to automate the download. The system has given me 7 days to download all 39 2GB archives before they are deleted. The process is time-consuming, so I have 1 day left and I still have to download the final 18 archives. Wednesday night project!

But Google is also starting to paywall some features of Photos, so I'm sensing this is the beginning of the end for the greatness of Photos, as new photos will start counting against storage quotas.

Google's effort to monetize photos makes complete sense, and their strategy appears to be to incentivize purchases of Google One, which will include more storage and also unlock more features. I'm now hoping that I can sync photos to my Synology and/or NextCloud accounts instead. It's not so much that I mind paying, it's that Google likes to change the ground rules after you've joined, which means I'm forced to adapt on their schedule. But I like to think of myself as the customer, where Google should be adapting to my needs, not the other way around.

Come June 1, 2021, all of your new photos will count against your free Google storage – TechCrunch