Pixel owners’ freebie went to iPhone owners. The latter now have unlimited storage in Google Photos

As we know, Pixel 4/4 XL smartphones are not privileged in the form of free Google Photos storage for photos and videos in original quality. Instead, like all smartphones with Android, the new items received the same free storage, but with compression of the source files.

The funniest thing is that the other day it turned out that users of Apple smartphones just have what the new Google devices should have. True, everything is not so simple here.

The fact is that the iPhone and iPad take photos in the HEIC format (aka HEIF), and this format has better compression than JPEG. And this leads to the fact that the Google Photos service does not compress the original photos from the iPhone, since in this case they would become even larger, and even this would have to spend computing resources.

Thus, it turns out that photos from the iPhone and iPad are stored on Google Photos in original quality. True, this feature does not work with video.

It is also interesting that Apple has been using HEIC format for a long time, and only now they started talking about such a loophole in Google Photos.