It's really easy to fill up your phone's storage with photos and videos; with microSD card support becoming increasingly scarce, the cloud can be a lifesaver. But can we stop ourselves from using up our storage allowances in exactly the same way? That's where Google Photos' Storage Saver feature comes in.

The purpose of Storage Saver is to free up space in Google Cloud storage by reducing the quality of backed up photos. So far, this feature is only available on desktop, but it is likely to be introduced to Android in the near future.

Android Authority discovered this during an APK teardown of the latest version of the Google Photos Android app. The code references Google's Storage Saver feature, a dialog that will allow users to choose the quality of photos that are backed up to the cloud.

However, lowering the image quality is a permanent change, meaning that while it saves storage space, the photos will not look as detailed as when they were taken. This is how storage savers currently work on the web. Presumably, this means that photos will be reduced to 16MP and videos will be reduced to 1080p.

It is also worth noting that this change will apply to everything backed up in your Google Photos account. Therefore, you cannot choose which files will be downgraded, and some will remain in their original image quality. While this is very nice to be able to do, it is not something Google is offering at the time of this writing. Google also limits compression to once a day.

Judging from the code, this change means that Android users will be able to tell Google Photos to compress their photos and videos in the cloud from their phones, rather than logging into Google Photos with a web browser. There is no need to log into Google Photos with a web browser. If you don't mind a slight loss in image quality to save storage space, this could come in handy. After all, Google's 15 GB of free space is not that much.

Of course, if you need to keep all your photos and videos in their original form, you'll want to pay for the right amount of storage; Google offers up to 5TB of storage as part of Google One, but you can instead use one of the other best You may prefer to use one of the cloud storage services.

Or, if you don't want to be tied to a subscription or upload to the cloud, the best external hard drives allow you to keep everything backed up locally. Just be sure to back up your files regularly, as they cannot be backed up automatically.