Google has just updated their Google Plus mobile app for the iPhone platform.

Features:

- full resolution photo uploads
- search
- photo +1

One of the new features is support for full resolution uploads. This means that if you are using an iPhone 4S, you can now share images in its full glory which comes to 8 megapixels.

But Google also has a policy that applies on Google Plus. All images uploaded from Google Plus are hosted for free and there is a size limitation of 2048 pixels on it.

Free storage limits

Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage.

Automatic resizing

All photos uploaded in Google+ will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge) and won’t count towards your free storage quota.

We test uploaded an image using the iPhone app and the app indeed uploaded an image larger than the free limit.

This means that Apple iPhone users of Google Plus might end up using the 1GB free storage that Google offers through Picasa or Google is making an exception for images uploaded from mobile devices.

Google Help documents do not mention any such exceptions.

PS. At least for now… The Android version of the app offers two ways to upload. The background sync service resizes the image to 2048px on the wider side. Sharing a photo through a post on Plus uploads a much smaller version. In both cases, the image size remains under the free limit. Google is expected to offer full resolution uploads on their Android app too in the coming days. We would check again if they mimic the behavior of the iOS app in that update. It is weird that Google has not stated anything about the free image storage policy in this update.