• Unlimited full-resolution photo storage is the main reason I subscribe to Prime.

    Prime Video I could easily do without, Prime Music I haven’t even tried, Twitch Prime throws my friend a couple bucks a month, free shipping doesn’t matter since I could just wait to hit the minimum spend for free shipping. All nice to have, I guess, but I wouldn’t pay for.

    But the unlimited full-resolution photo storage alone is worth the full subscription price. I don’t even know how many 100s of GB of photos my wife and I have taken over the last decade, especially since having kids. Maybe another 5GB/mo?

    • Prime Photos is nice but it doesn’t include videos, and I also wonder how long it will last. Nobody can really give out so much space for free, both Microsoft and Google tried to do it in the past and they reverted it back.

      • Yeah, fair. I backup my videos by syncing to my old Pixel 3a. It’s low res, but I don’t really care about video quality on old videos. If I’m recording something to upload or share, then I’ll work with the original file.

  • I cancelled my storage subscription with google in the past year, partially to degoogle my life, but also because in all those years they kept the price the same for the same amount of storage. It’s not like it was that much, 20€ for 100GB/year, but I have MS O365 family plan which gives me 1TB per account, so no real point in staying.

    At one point I will have to demicrosoft I suppose, but I:m not in a rush. At least MS doesn’t convert my pictures to shitty quality.

    • I’m close to doing the same. Mostly because of how poorly they handled Google Play Credit cards being hung up in their automated system and basically stiffing me for them. They can’t be returned to the store despite Google insisting they can be. I gave up after 13 attempts…

      Being more than a Google Drive and YouTube customer I have other Google services I’m not sure it’s worth the effort anymore. This is after years of paying monthly fees all because I can’t find a human at google to resolve a google play gift card issue on their end. I hope California takes them to the cleaners in the class action over the millions in Google Play they are holding.

      It’s free money for them as there is no way for many users to redeem or refund these cards bought in grocery stores, online, and/or big box stores. This is the part where I think they have slided into the evil part the early version of them were concerned about.

    • Or that they would de-duplicate photo storage. Currently, if you upload one from phone+tablet+computer or some other combo of devices, the photos all count towards your storage limit rather than storing one object and having references to that same one object. It is a problem already solved multiple ways.

      • if you upload one from phone+tablet+computer or some other combo of devices,

        How and when does that even happen?

        Google Files app has a feature to identify and delete duplicates from the same device. Very handy.

        • No, I believe they are saying one 5mb photo file is duplicated per device it’s saved on, meaning 3 devices with the same photo will cost you 15mb of drive storage instead of just the 5mb it’s supposed to.

          • Saving is optional - you don’t have to save a photo to be able to browse it. And yes, browsing it will take some storage space as well since the app has to download, cache and render the image somehow but that’s true for any device and just the way it works.