Size of your photos/videos

When you store your pictures in your Google account, you have these options to choose from:

    • "Storage saver" (formerly called "High quality") will:

      • Resample your images to 16 MPixels, and videos to 1080 pixels when they are larger. Note that this does affect high quality (4K) videos more than photos.
        Remark: photos of some camera's are not compressed due to the presence of a MPF tag (Multiple Photo file), for example because there is an embedded small JPEG. See this thread.

      • Apply compression to reduce the storage needed on the Google servers.

    • "Original": this will upload your images at original resolution/quality.

    • In some countries there is also "Express backup" resizing the photos to 3 MP and videos to 480p.
      Very well suited for viewing and sharing.

    • You must set the size/quality in each app used for uploading, that is for example "Backup and sync" on each computer or mobile device. The setting in https://photos.google.com/settings is only valid for manual uploads.

Till June 1, 2021 uploading with "High quality" or "Express" was free. After that date the actual (reduced) size does count for storage.

After uploading in "Original size" it is possible to use "Recover storage" in https://photos.google.com/settings.
You should recover storage when your free storage gets full and not after every upload.

Please also read: Google Photos "High quality" vs "Original": What's the difference and should you care

Google gives you 15 GB free storage and it is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. You can check following sites for info about used storage: