“We are aware of this bug and are working to resolve it,” a Google spokesperson just told our colleagues at Android Authority. According to the site, HEIC photos are never compressed or taken into account in the quota, and it is possible to reproduce it on Android smartphones with HEIC/F photos. It seems that the fact that iPhone users were able to upload their photos for free in high quality was not intentional – but actually it has to do with the fact that these smartphones offer the ability to save photos in HEIC format by default. We don’t yet know how Google plans to fix this: will Google ban the HEIC format, include it in the quota, systematically compress photos in JPG, or compress photos even more efficiently?
In our article originally published on October 18, 2019, we wrote:
It happens regularly that Google gets itself into awkward situations – sometimes to the point of giving the impression that the firm prefers the Apple ecosystem to the detriment of Android. Regarding the latest Google Photos: Since the first Pixel, Google has offered some truly high-end unlimited storage on home smartphones. But since Pixel 4 it’s over: by default the app now compresses photos.
Google Photos gives iPhone users the impression of preferring Pixel 4
In turn, users of these smartphones get three months of free access to Google One, which includes unlimited storage of high-quality photos, but beyond that they have to pay. At that time, it was thought that everyone would be in the same boat, both in the Android competition and on the iPhone side.
Not at all: As 9to5Mac points out, iPhone owners using Google Photos get absolutely free access to unlimited high-quality photo storage. The reasoning is quite plausible from a real point of view – albeit a little less from a commercial standpoint: iPhones by default store their photos in HEIC format, not JPG.
A tremendously efficient format that gives you much better quality photos than the compressed JPG format while controlling the size of the final file. Bottom line: Google Photos can’t compress them any further – converting them to JPG will result in larger files. The fact of automatically compressing billions of photos generates significant costs in exchange for storing photos indefinitely, which Apple somehow saves from Google.
However, on iPhones too, videos encoded in the new, super-efficient HEVC format remain compressed by Google Photos. Meanwhile, the HEIC format is supported by iOS, Windows or Android Pie and later. However, it is a proprietary format that is not certain that Google has the right to use to save photos on Android – which probably explains why Google didn’t offer it on the Pixel 4 as it did on iOS and now saves the photos in HEIC. by default.
Source : 9to5Mac
