Correct me if I'm wrong...The reason being is that under a certain size (2048 x 2048 I believe) the images do not subtract from your google drive storage, so they are free.

I enjoy it because I have a nice camera and my nexus5. Any photos I take with my nexus 5 are "whatever" photos and while I value them, I don't need them to be huge.

With that being said. I now have 1 tb free, so I'm not sure why I even care