Google has announced a major update to Google Photos, the unlimited free photo backups at high quality is being rolled out after five years. Now users have to pay for upload more than 15GB onto their accounts.

The change will happen on June 1st, 2021, and it comes with other Google Drive policy changes like counting Google Workspace documents and spreadsheets against the same cap.

Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.

However, all photos and documents uploaded before June 1st will not count against that 15GB cap, so you have plenty of time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or switching to another cloud storage provider for your photos. Only photos uploaded after June 1st will begin counting against the cap.

“Any photos or videos you’ve uploaded in High quality before June 1, 2021 will not count toward your 15GB of free storage. This means that photos and videos backed up before June 1, 2021 will still be considered free and exempt from the storage limit. You can verify your backup quality at any time in the Photos app by going to back up and sync in Settings,” Shimrit Ben-Yair, VP, Google Photos said in a statement.

Once the change takes effect, more than 80 per cent of current Google Photos users should still be able to store about three years of content with that free 15GB. Google will notify you in the app and by email once you get close to hitting your 15GB limit.

The only users that will be exempt from this policy change are Pixel smartphone users, who will still be able to upload “high quality” photos without any limits after June next year.

Google claims that the reason for the change is to provide users with a higher quality experience and plans to further develop Google Photos in the future.

It seems like an easy way for Google to push people to pay for its Google One plans. The company announced the basic plan starting from 100 GB for the price of Rs 130 per month, and Rs 1,300 a year to a 30 TB plan, which costs Rs 19,500 per month.