Google Photos just halved the time you have to rescue trashed pictures

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How much effort do you put into to curating your photographs? When you’ve got a giant bucket of Google One storage to fill up, some users will just save every snapshot they ever take. Even when you have all the space in the world, there’s a lot to be said for weeding out the pics you definitely don’t want. But what if you end up second-guessing yourself? Maybe that questionable pic is worth keeping, after all? Hopefully you make up your mind soon, because Google Photos is slashing your restore window in half for trashed pics.

So far, if you’ve backed up an image with Google Photos, then moved that pic to the trash, you’d get a 60-day grace period before it was deleted for good. For pics that are just stored locally on a device, you’ve only had 30 days.

Last month we spotted Google working to change that, with an update previewing the company’s intent to shorten the window on clearing trash in the cloud from 60 days to 30 days.

Google has now begun informing users of the shortening grace period. The company already updated its Photos support docs earlier this month to reflect the new 30-day limit, and now we’re seeing users begin to be notified of the change within the Photos app:

On one hand, 30 days is still a lot of time, and if you haven’t made up your mind about keeping a pic or not after several weeks, what’s going to happen in another few to change your mind? That said, this also feels like a service downgrade, and that’s never the sort of change we’re happy to see.

Do you think this is nothing worth complaining about? Or is Google doing Photos users dirty, and risking the chance that they accidentally discard some precious memories? Make your argument down in the comments.

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