In a blog post entitled “Bringing it all together”, Google announced that they’re now unifying all storage onto your Google Drive and offering 15 gigabytes of combined storage for all your photos, videos, documents, etc. The post went into the rationale behind the change, and some of the potential positives:
“Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together—whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+. As this experience becomes more seamless, separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So instead of having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.
With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.”
Google’s always taking steps to increase the connectedness of all of its services, and this is a major one. Having one pool of storage across all the services tied to your google account will make storing your files even easier and available from one source across your Google products. Also, this encourages using Drive to share files, which will bring those you share with into google’s universe to see the files, whether or not they already have a google account. Smooth move, Googs, just keep the free storage coming!
[Via: Google Drive Blog]