Sure, Google is well within its rights to stop its free service and start a new paid service to replace it at any time it likes. These days, though, with 108-megapixel sensors becoming common (even if they are quad-or-more-Bayer sensors that ultimately composite down to a lower resolution), that’s a heck of a difference – although, still nowhere near the quality difference illustrated in the image Google sent out. In 2015, the 16-megapixel limit was fine, because there weren’t really any mass consumer smartphones with resolutions higher than this back then. And with many phones shooting video at 4K rather than 1080p, those are obviously much larger files, too – all of which will be eating into your 15GB of free storage, and possibly exceeding it, after the deadline comes. Original quality images, however, even if they are the same resolution as the HQ versions are significantly larger in file size.
#Google photos search 2018 1080p
Google’s High quality images are limited to 16-megapixels for photos and 1080p resolution for video and until June, they’re still free to store on the service. These examples back up Google’s original claim that they offer “near-identical visual quality” at much smaller file sizes. A difference that just doesn’t seem to mix well with reality, as this PhoneArena article from 2018 comparing original jpgs to Google Photos’ High Quality versions of the same images illustrates and presenting massive storage savings in the process.
The image apparently included in the email, shown at the top of this post, portrays a drastic difference in quality between the “original quality” and “high quality” versions of the same image.