Google Photos is a great way to backup all of your precious photos and videos to the cloud for free. This unlimited storage feature was offered since 2015 and it allows you to keep your photos in a slightly compressed high-resolution format. For Pixel owners, you’ll get to keep your photos and videos in its original resolution for free.
Now it appears that Google has made a slight revision where unsupported videos will take up space on your cloud storage.
This new change appears to be applicable to unsupported videos that are uploaded after 6 December 2018. According to Google’s support pages, Google Photos currently support mpg, .mod, .mmv, .tod, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .divx, .mov, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .m2t, .m2ts, .mts, and .mkv files. That should cover most videos captured on smartphones and cameras.
To find out if you’ve stored any unsupported videos, you can go to Google Photos and then tap on settings under the menu button. You should see an “Unsupported videos” selection and from there you can download the video or delete it completely.
When I checked my own list of unsupported videos, it appears that Google Photos can’t support 360-degree videos that were recorded from a Samsung Gear 360. Even a time-lapse video recorded on a GoPro is listed as unsupported as well. Both are saved in MP4 format which is part of Google’s supported extension.
Google has also mentioned that videos that are corrupted or too short (less than a second) in duration are not supported as well. The good news is that if your unsupported file was uploaded on and before 6 December, it will not affect your current storage.
We’ve reached out to Google for further clarification on the update. We will update this post when we get a reply. Have you checked your unsupported video list? Let us know if you have a working video that’s categorised as unsupported by Google Photos.
