Google curtails free photo storage, pushes users to buy more space

A woman holds her smart phone which displays the Google home page, in this picture illustration taken February 24, 2016. [Reuters]

Alphabet Inc's Google will start limiting how many high-quality photos users can store on the company's cloud back-up service starting next June, in a move that could help protect profit margins.

“Growing demand for storage” means Google Photos can no longer honor a years-old policy of unlimited capacity for high-quality images, the company said in a blog post. Storage of images, along with files in Google’s document editing services, will instead be capped at a combined total of 15 gigabytes.