Google's newly-announced change to its pricing structure for Google Photos, in which "high quality" photo storage will begin counting against people's online storage, will be applied as widely as was feared, it's confirmed.
The principle clarification here is that its own Pixel phones, which have previously come with free lifetime photo storage, will be losing that perk moving forward in order to make for a one-size-fits-all system as announced.
That means that, like the rest of us, in June 2021 even those buying whatever Pixel phones Google comes up with next will have to pony up for a Google One plan or find a different photo storage site for their archive as it grows past the free 15GB limit.
This is, in fact, the second time Google's revised the Pixel's storage benefit down - at first, the phones came with unlimited storage at photos' original file size, before that was revised down to the "high quality" benchmark itself, presumably once Google realized how much free data storage this really equated to for most people.
Now, it would seem that the golden days are at an end, and paying for photo storage is going to be a problem all of us have to confront in our own ways.