Don’t Let Google Scare You With Paying for Google Photos
Google Photos will be leaving soon – at least the useful free service we’ve been using to store years of photos is finally running out of storage. Go beyond that and you have to pay to keep your photos. That’s not great, but almost as annoying is the scare tactic Google uses to convince free users to upgrade to a paid subscription.
As Paul Monckton of Forbes wrote last week :
“In a recent email to subscribers, the Google Photos team described the new premium editing features available exclusively to paid Google One customers. However, there is also a somewhat unexpected section in the email encouraging users to use more of their storage quota by switching from high quality downloads to raw quality downloads, otherwise they risk seemingly dire consequences.
According to the email, “Original quality photos retain most of the detail and allow you to enlarge, crop and print photos with fewer pixels.” While this statement is objectively true, it is at odds with what Google has told us in the past about its high quality option. ”
Google has also added a photo to illustrate the obvious, tangible difference between “stock” and “high” quality settings. Their example, however, is a little suspicious – a bird shot that looks perfect on the “original quality” side and washed out or washed out on the “high quality” side. (I did not receive the email from Google myself, otherwise I would have dropped by here for you to judge.)
However, it doesn’t really matter because Google is behaving like an alarmist. I think what the company is actually trying to say is that high quality photos are stored at no more than 16MP or 4920 x 3264 pixels, while original quality images are (obviously) stored with no file size, pixel count, or size limits. … In theory, you can crop to a smaller portion of a high quality image and still retain a high enough level of detail, say, for a print copy – more than you would otherwise if you cropped to the same portion of the image. lower resolution image.
Certainly. But is the difference really as significant as Google? First, if you’re taking selfies, chances are good that your image doesn’t even reach the 16-megapixel limit for “high quality” images in Google Photos. For example, here’s the same image in a row. The first is the original image, the second is a high quality uploaded image from Google Photos:
I understand that it is difficult to tell the difference when looking at a smaller version of a photograph on a website. Feel free to download them to your computer if you like; I did this, and when switching between them in the Windows 10 Photos app, I don’t see any disturbing differences. (Also, the files have the same resolution.)
Then I turned it on and took a normal image on my Samsung Note 20 Ultra – 12MP or 4000 by 3000 pixels. This is lower than Google’s 16MP limit, so I expected little, if any, differences. The original file I took off turned out to be the same resolution as the version of Google Photos I downloaded (of course); Google’s compression cut the file size in half, but didn’t make much of a difference in quality.
Next, a 108MP or 12000 by 9000 image, which Google shrinks to 4618 by 3464 (16MP) when you upload it with high quality settings. When I look at both images in a row on my 1440p display, the only difference I really see is that Google’s version actually looks a little sharper – probably a byproduct of its compression technique.
Of course, if you were to crop a portion of this image, you would probably get a better overall image from an image with a lot of pixel data compared to a much smaller image. No questions asked – especially if you want to print a larger image than what is best for a smaller cropped photo. Enlarging an image and zooming in on details that are not there is more risky in terms of quality than going the other way: a giant image is compressed to fit a specific print size. Or, to put it another way, more pixels per inch is generally a good thing, other things being equal, because it allows you to print larger images without any noticeable loss of quality.
I’ll leave these two frames here for discussion, but the difference in quality is what you will experience if or when you fiddle with image sizes. This chunk of my giant image still gave me quite a lot of playability – 6056 pixels by 3406 pixels, or 20.63 megapixels (20.2 by 11.4 inches image at 300 pixels per inch). The smaller image, however, had a resolution of 2326 by 1308 pixels, or about 3 MP (an image measuring 7.8 by 4.4 inches at 300 ppi).
If you enlarge the smaller image to the size of the larger image and print it, you will undoubtedly end up with a softer image. The difference is a little less noticeable on a typical monitor as, at least in this case, even the cropped file is almost as large as my default monitor resolution. (If I had a 4K display, if only I noticed a big difference.)
So Google is correct in pointing out that storing the largest image possible in Google Photos actually gives you a less blurry image if you need to crop a portion and print it at a larger size. Certainly. The same is true if you crop part of a giant image to turn it into your desktop wallpaper; you will get more bang for your buck if the original image is huge.
But will it make a big difference outside of these rare use cases? If you’re shooting at less than 16MP, no. In this case, you won’t even exceed Google Photos’ High Quality. And if so, you can always just crop the image to whatever you want it to be and then upload that to Google Photos. This is a much better scenario than uploading it to Google Photos, which compresses it to a 16MP image and then crops it from there.
I usually find Google’s scare tactics to be little more than helpful advice because they know people will see blurry “high quality” photos, panic, and start spending money on a Google storage subscription that allows them to upload original … high quality images on Google Photos. We’ll all be there after all ( unless you switch to another service ), but don’t jump until you need to take the plunge. For most people, the quality of your image will be quite acceptable, regardless of the paid subscription.