Why Do Photos Shrink When I Upload to Google?
Google Photos has long offered one of the best deals in all of photo storage: information technology'll support your entire library for free, so long as it can compress the images a fleck. But as of tomorrow, June 1st, that deal goes away, and you're now eating through Google storage (which y'all may have to pay for) whether your images are compressed or non.
With the modify looming, I've been wondering how bad Google's compression actually is. Does the compression leave my photos in "High Quality," as Google has claimed for years? Or does the compression degrade my photos enough to brand it worth using more storage past switching over to "Original Quality" backups?
I ran some quick tests this morning to find out. I took some photos and videos from my Pixel 5 (one of a few phones that will continue to become free compressed storage) and a photograph from my Fuji Ten-T30 and uploaded them to two separate Google Photos accounts, one with compression turned on and one that maintained original quality.
The results were mixed. For photos, the compressed versions were often indistinguishable from their uncompressed counterparts. But once you're losing resolution, the compression really starts to show.
Here'due south what I plant across a scattering of tests. You tin can click the images to view them at a larger size.
I can't find a difference in this photo of my cat
Hither's a photograph I took recently of my cat, Pretzel. I zoomed in on his hair, his eyes, and the books in the background, and I can't discover a departure. The photo, taken on a Pixel five, was originally 3.4MB but was compressed downwards to 1.5MB.
This ultrawide photo looks basically the same
I took this picture on Yale's campus last weekend with the Pixel 5'southward ultrawide photographic camera. Both versions look peachy while in total screen on my figurer. Y'all could probably make an statement about whether there's some more noises around the edges of the leaves in the compressed version, but I'g by and large of the mindset that if you have to search for image issues, they don't really matter.
The space saving isn't very substantial here: Google'due south compression takes the file size from 7.3MB to 5.7MB.
The epitome size shrinks dramatically from my mirrorless camera
Here'south a photo I took this forenoon of Pretzel on my Fuji X-T30. I zoomed in on his face, and couldn't find a difference even when both were blown upward as large as Google Photos could brand them.
At kickoff, it seemed like this was a situation where Google Photos' compression won out: the file size shrank from 12MB to but 662KB, and the images await practically identical.
Merely at that place's one very notable difference. Google caps photo resolution at 16 megapixels, which shrank the photo significantly from the original 26 megapixel file my photographic camera saved. Hither's a zoomed-in crop showing how the particular starts to disappear as blocky noise comes in:
Now look, I don't know that I need all 26 megapixels of this image at this signal in time. Only if I ever wanted to print this photo in a larger format, crop it down the road, or otherwise brand changes to it, those extra pixels would be a huge advantage to accept retained.
Video pinch is but bad
In that location'south nothing inherently wrong with 1080p video, merely in that location is something wrong with the style Google processes it. And unfortunately, if y'all use Google'due south compression, all your videos will exist compressed at 1080p.
When that happens, everything becomes smudgy, details simply vanish, and some colors even lose their pop. It'due south a actually significant downgrade in terms of quality. I'm not able to embed a Google Photos video hither, so I included a screenshot comparison above. I think y'all tin see about of the differences, although it'south much clearer how blurry text becomes at larger sizes.
I originally recorded this video in 4K back on my Pixel five back in February. It looks nice enough on my not-4K figurer screen. Street signs, faces, and the falling snow all await precipitous. Just the compressed version is kind of a mess — it looks like I recorded it with a layer of grease on my camera lens.
The loss (or savings) of data is a big one here: it falls from 55MB for this ten second clip to just 6MB. No wonder it looks then much worse.
The pinch makes a difference... sometimes
I still came abroad mostly impressed by the quality maintained later Google's compression. For photos, the result tin be nearly indistinguishable so long equally the original file is nether 16 megapixels. Merely for videos, there's no question that uncompressed is the way to get. It'southward besides bad that Google doesn't permit you set different options for photos and videos.
The existent drawback is that compressing your photos doesn't ever save a ton of space. That extra space definitely adds up as you button thousands of new photos into the deject each year. Only if you're going to have to pay anyway, it might be worth maintaining your photos — and especially your videos — at their full quality, particularly if yous're uploading them in college resolutions.
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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/31/22461871/google-photos-compression-comparison-storage
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