It was only a matter of time before Google stopped giving out unlimited photo storage for free. The company announced the change yesterday, and along with the news came a nifty new feature to help give users an estimate about how long their existing storage plan will last. Here's how to find when you'll have to start forking over money to Google for more storage.

The tool is located at https://photos.google.com/storage. Once you navigate to the page and sign in with your Google account, it will display the estimated amount of time before your current storage plan will be completely used up. The estimate is based on your personal upload history, so your time frame will depend on whether you upload a ton of large videos or only use Google Photos to save the occasional snapshot.

My estimate sounds too good to be true.

The tool will show you how much room is being used up by photos and videos, as well as how much is taken by other products like Google Drive and Gmail. This makes it a bit confusing; it's unclear if the estimate is based on uploads to Photos or on Drive uploads as well. Clicking the "learn more" button brings up a help page telling about the new policy changes being implemented next June.

While it's a shame that Google is ending unlimited storage of photos in high quality, I appreciate that the company is giving us a long lead time before it kicks in, as well as tools like this that help to give more peace of mind about the future of our digital memories. If you're still sad about losing out, why not go and check your own estimate? It might offer a little bit of reassurance.

Source: @dflieb