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At its I/O event yesterday, Google unveiled its new cloud photo sharing service — Google Photos. The service is actually just a rebranded version of Google+ Photos, but comes with a few enhancements and features, including an unlimited storage option.
While Google offers 15GB of free storage space on Drive/Photos, photos uploaded to the cloud service with a maximum resolution of 16MP do not count against this storage space. Even videos with a maximum resolution of 1080p are excluded from this 15GB of free storage space.
However, what Google failed to mention at its keynote in I/O yesterday, is that the uploaded images and videos will be compressed by the service. As per the images uploaded by redditor freshyfunk, a 1.3MB 4MP photo taken from the HTC One M7 was compressed to 779KB, while a 37.2MB Full HD video was compressed to only 2.3MB.
Left: Original, Right: Compressed
Left: Original, Right: Compressed
While such levels of compression sounds bad, it barely seem to have any effect on the quality of the uploaded images. It is only when you download the compressed images and compare them side-by-side to the original ones, that a slight difference in quality is visible.
In case you don’t want Google to compress your uploaded photos, you can select the option to upload photos at full size in the Photos app. However, this will mean that any photo or video you upload will count against the 15GB of storage space in your Google account.
[Via Reddit]
