Stephenvsawyer (a reddit user) recently shared a post on reddit pointing out iPhone users (running iOS 11 or later) can save unlimited original quality photos taken from their phones on Google Photos. Those of you who don’t know Google Photos allows us to store unlimited photos on our account, providing the photo resolution should not exceed 16 megapixels.
Now, to prevent high-resolution photos (exceeding 16 megapixels) in counting towards Google Storage space, Photographers often compress their photos and then upload them to their Google Photos account.
Well, that is not in the case with iPhone users because they can store unlimited original photos (which they take from their iPhone) in their Google Photos account. Stephen points out this became possible because of the file format iPhones are saving photos into. Well, all the iPhones that are running iOS 11 or later are saving photos in HEIC format.
HEIC is a file format for Photos like most of you know JPG and PNG. What unique about HEIC file format is, it is smaller than the JPG photos compressed by Google. That’s the reason when a user saves HEIC photo files on Google Photos; it stores them in its original form. Stephen explains that When Google Photos try to compress HEIC photos, they became massive.
So, saving a photo in HEIC format helps both the iPhone users and Google, because, that way, Google requires low computing power to process photos on their server. On the other side, iPhone users able to save unlimited photos in their original form.
In this article, I found one thing funnier is Google’s own Pixel 4 users not able to store unlimited photos (on Google Photos) taken from their phone, but iPhone users do.
Read also: How to Create Live Album in Google Photos? (Guide)
