I take a lot of pictures. Also, I take a lot of photos of the same scene to be sure I capture it in the best possible manner. I never delete any image unless it's really bad and useless, and that means I have a considerable amount of photos stored on my Galaxy S6 edge. This takes a lot of storage on the phone since the 16-megapixel camera takes pictures that are pretty big in size.
To free some of the storage on a phone, saving photos on the cloud has always been a great option. But there's also the fact that all cloud storage services offer you limited storage, and if you can get in on their storage giveaways, the increased space only lasts for around two years. Google's Photos service goes against the norm and offers unlimited free storage for photos, but only if you save them in a downsized, lower quality format, and as a result I've always had to keep my photos on my phone itself.
Well, until now.
At Google I/O, Google announced that its Photos service is now separate from Google+, and more importantly, it now offers unlimited free storage for pictures up to 16-megapixel in size. It was possibly one of the most important announcements of the event, and as I have come to realize, it's a pretty useful offering – I am no longer limited to using up the storage on my Galaxy S6 edge just so I can hold on to the full-quality images. All of my photos on Google+ now are uploaded in their original resolution, giving me the option of deleting them from my phone and simply keeping them on the cloud.
I'm not doing this for recent photos though, since keeping files on the cloud means you need a data connection to load them, but all those photos I took months ago are no longer on my phone (I transferred the pictures from my existing phone to the Galaxy S6 edge when I bought it.) Okay, so I can't use Samsung's Gallery app if I want to look at those old photos, but that's not really a disadvantage especially now that I no longer need to have the Google+ app installed to be able to use Google Photos. Oh, and I also need to be on a Wi-Fi connection so that I don't blow through my data allowance, but the nature of my job means I'm almost always connected to a Wi-Fi network.
The lack of a microSD slot on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge can never be made up for for many people, but I can certainly say that Google's new unlimited policy for large photos on its Photos service is kind of a godsend. So what if Google might have added support for expandable storage on Android at the wrong time – at least the internet giant is making sure that I can now free up the storage on my Galaxy S6 edge by offloading those pictures that I very rarely want to check out off to a cloud storage service that will keep them online forever.
