Google made millions of people sigh in relief when they launched their Google Photos service back at Google I/O 2015. Until then, it was near impossible to find a image hosting service that would store all of your photos indefinitely, for free. Those who didn't have many photos saved could find plenty of solutions out there, but most always had some sort of storage capacity limit when it came to the free tier account. Thankfully this changed with Google Photos.

Sure, Google won't save every image at full resolution without compression (unless you're uploading it from a Pixel phone), but so far the compression they're using is so minimal that it is hard to distinguish the difference in quality. Not only did Google Photos offer image hosting for all of your photographs, but they have also integrated a number of popular features with album sharing sitting close to the top as a favorite among the community.

The company even expanded upon its sharing features this year at Google I/O with what they call smarter sharing. These sharing features are great for average use cases, but big events such as a vacation can push them to their limits. This is what many people noticed with album sharing in Google Photos as it was limited to 2,000 photos. So while this was fine for most, it was definitely a limitation for some anytime they wanted to share a ton of photos.

This seems to have changed over the last couple of weeks though. /u/Chaosblast in the /r/Android subreddit noticed that they were allowed to add more than 2,000 photos to a shared album, and XDA Portal Editor Steven Zimmerman was able to confirm for us as well. At this time, it's unclear if the limit has just been increased (to something like 5,000), or if the limit has been removed entirely. For this to work though, you have to go inside the album and then add the images from there. If you try to do it outside the album then it looks like you'll still be hitting that 2,000 limit.


Source: /r/Android