Summary

• Google Photos’ default Storage Saver uses lossy compression, downsizing photos to 16MP and 4K videos to 1080p.
• Compression is often invisible on phones, but you’ll notice it if you’re trying to edit the file.
• Switch each device to Original Quality to stop future compression, but your past uploads can’t be restored.

Google Photos feels like the digital safe for tons of our most precious memories, offering what seems like endless space for our pictures and videos. It’s a tool many have grown very used to, but a default setting that quietly but seriously changes the very quality of the photos and videos we trust it with.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that this apparent generosity of free and cheap storage space often comes with an unsaid catch. While the service is busy saving your moments, it might not be keeping them in the exact, pristine condition you originally shot them in.

The idea of free storage was Google Photos’ most killer feature for ages, making it the go-to for users just wanting an easy way to keep their memories safe. However, the hidden cost is a subtle but real downgrade in the original quality of your images and videos. By default, Google Photos has been quietly running a strategy that puts massive space savings over keeping the original resolution and detail intact. This setting, called “Storage Saver,” aggressively slashes file sizes through compression.

Essentially, this has been a hidden trade-off, where users unknowingly sacrificed a bit of their media’s fidelity for the massive benefit of maximizing their free Google Account quota. The tech behind this space-saving trick is lossy compression, meaning data is permanently and irretrievably tossed out of your files to make them smaller. When you use the Storage Saver setting, photos bigger than 16 megapixels are resized down to 16 MP, and videos over 1080p high-definition (like 4K) get compressed and reduced to 1080p.

To be fair, Google’s compression algorithms often shrink photo file sizes by 30% to over 75% without you immediately noticing a difference with the naked eye. Still, if you plan on doing things that need max detail, like printing big banners or severely cropping and editing the files, the quality loss can become noticeable.

Remember that videos tend to suffer way worse than photos, getting a lower bitrate that can make motion look blurry or blocky when you watch them on bigger screens. The only way to store files exactly as you shot them, preserving crucial things like camera settings and detailed metadata, is the original, uncompressed option, known as “Original quality.”

The idea of truly free, unlimited, and uncompressed cloud storage is fundamentally unsustainable. Every single photo and video, whether it’s top-tier or compressed, lives on finite physical servers here on Earth, and those servers have massive costs for infrastructure, cooling, maintenance, and running the whole thing.

When Google rolled out its truly free services, the company was essentially playing a long game. It was giving users all those features for free until around the year 2021, when storage became limited. The reality is that someone has to ultimately bear the cost of storing petabytes of data.

The Storage Saver compression, even though it’s lossy, is a good compromise. For the vast majority of people who mainly view photos on their phone screens, the visual difference is negligible, and it makes that free 15 GB last considerably longer. This strategy, whether you call it a smart business move or a bait and switch, is a good option for most people.

Storage Saver vs. Original Quality

Credit: Justin Duino / How-To Geek

When you’re choosing between Storage Saver and Original Quality in Google Photos, you’re really making a big decision about how long and how well your favorite digital memories will last. It’s a classic trade-off: preservation vs. convenience. Original Quality is exactly what it sounds like: it’s the setting you have to pick if you truly care about keeping your photos and videos exactly as you shot them, with absolutely no compromises.

When you back up your media this way, your files are stored at their full resolution, their original size, and they keep all that crucial, deeply embedded EXIF data tied to the shot. The catch is that these full-resolution files will eat into your Google Account storage quota, which you also use for Drive and Gmail.

On the other hand, Storage Saver is all about saving space, and it does that by aggressively shrinking your files with compression. If you go with Storage Saver, Google Photos will compress your images, no matter what you do, so you’re basically okay with a worse image.

While Storage Saver compression is definitely necessary for conserving cloud storage resources, especially with uploaded files counting toward the standard 15 GB free quota, this data loss can really hinder your ability to find and organize things down the road. Since high-resolution photos and 4K videos eat up space really fast, choosing Storage Saver is often a financial move to delay paying for a Google One subscription.

If the absolute quality of your media is paramount, especially for professional work or irreplaceable historical archives, Original Quality is the only reliable choice. Keep in mind, this will deplete your storage faster and make you spend money. You can always try to free up space wherever you can to negate this.

How to Change Your Upload Settings

Credit: Jorge Aguilar / How To Geek | Google Photos

You can easily stop your new photos and videos from being compressed by just switching your default upload setting to Original Quality. To do this on your mobile device, whether you’re rocking an Android or an iPhone, open up the Google Photos app. Then, tap on your profile picture or initial in the top-right corner to get to your profile. From that menu, you’ll want to select Photos settings, and after that, tap on the Backup or Back Up & Sync section.

In this menu, look for the Upload Size or Backup quality option and select it. Finally, you can switch your preference from Storage Saver to Original Quality. This immediately pushes all new media you upload from that specific device into the Original Quality tier. If you tend to upload stuff from a desktop computer, you should also change this setting right on the web by heading over to photos.google.com, where you can select Original Quality from the upload options.

It’s super important to remember, though, that if you use Google Photos on multiple devices, changing the backup quality on one device won’t affect the settings on any other one. You’ve got to manually adjust the preference on every device you use for uploads.

Unfortunately, making this change only affects future uploads. The compressed format applied by Storage Saver is irreversible, meaning all the photos and videos you’ve already backed up with it are permanently compressed. Once they’re compressed, that quality loss is baked into the file, so you can’t ever recover the original, uncompressed data. If you were using the old “High quality” setting,

If you’re starting to run low on storage, but you don’t want to or can’t buy more space with a subscription, there are a few free ways to get some space back. Search for “blurry” on Google Photos to find and show you photos or videos you might want to ditch, like blurry photos, screenshots, and large videos, letting you clear out the unnecessary items and make the most of the storage you have left.

Since storage is shared, you can also free up space by cleaning out your Gmail or Google Drive. In Gmail, you can search for emails with huge attachments by typing has:attachment larger:10MB into the search bar. This lets you review and delete those large files that tend to build up over time and is a way to avoid paying more for Google Photos storage space.

Alternatively, if you uploaded files in Original Quality and you now need space, you can access the storage management feature on the web version of Google Photos and find the “Recover storage” section. This lets you convert your existing Original Quality photos and videos to Storage Saver quality. Be aware that this is an “all or nothing” deal for the items uploaded in Original Quality, and it permanently deletes the original files.

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We’re walking a fine line between making things easy and actually keeping your photos in their best shape. You have to understand this if you’re trusting your memories to the cloud. The best thing to do is decide what you want and then use that option.

If you’re a professional photographer or artist, you should really always keep your originals in a physical storage device. Otherwise, the loss in quality shouldn’t be much of an issue, especially if you just want to look at your images.