Google’s Pixel series of smartphones have always focused on offering a stellar camera experience. But with high-quality images, one needs a lot of storage. The company had thought of that as well and was offering unlimited storage for photos retaining original quality. Sure it had some terms and conditions, but one could keep shooting photos without having to worry about storage.
However, the unique selling point of the Pixel changed when Google announced the Pixel 4 a few days back. The new phones do not offer free unlimited storage backup for photos in their original quality. While this is a big disappointment, it seems that Apple users are going to enjoy this very much. Reportedly, iPhone users will get the benefit of backing up their photos with free unlimited storage.
How? Well to understand this better, lets understand the image formats. As we all know the most commonly used image format is JPEG or JPG. While photos taken by the Pixel phones make use of the same format, almost all existing iPhones today shoot in HEIC or HEIF. Now this offers a smaller file size if you compare it to Google’s compressed JPG files.
Since the iPhone is saving photos in the HEIC or HEIF image format, users can get free unlimited storage at the original resolution and quality on Google Photos. This is because Google’s compression will not decrease but actually increase the file size of the photo on the iPhone. Android 10 does bring the ability to shoot in HEIC format, but as of now, there is no clarity as to when it will be rolled out to the Pixel 4. In all possibility, Google will not fix this loophole as it will cost both storage space and a lot of computing power to convert billions of iPhone photo backups.
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