When you sign up for a Google account, you get a very generous 15GB of cloud storage. That sounds like loads, but if you’ve had an account for a while, you’ll know that it goes only so far — especially as it’s divided between Drive, Gmail and Photos.
If you’re receiving warnings about your space filling up, you may be tempted to pay for Google One storage to make them go away. There’s nothing wrong with that, but before you do, you should try giving your Google storage a spring clean.
If you’ve had your account for years, there’s probably loads of stuff you can safely get rid of. The trouble is knowing where to find it — and weirdly for a company that specialises in search, Google doesn’t make it very easy to track down the space hogs.
We’re here to help. Here are some tips for clearing space in Drive, Gmail and Photos.
First things first…
Before you begin clearing space, you need to know where the main storage offenders are.
Google divides your storage into three areas, and you can figure out your space by visiting the Google One homepage and logging in. As you can see from the screenshot below, my main offender is Google Photos, closely followed by Gmail.
To its credit, Google does point you to some easy wins on the management page. It highlights especially large emails and files, telling you how much you could save by deleting them.
But if these are essential files you need to keep, you’ll need something a bit more granular to free up space. Here are some tips for each part of Google Storage.
How to clear space in Google Photos
First of all, it’s far easier to delete photos in a browser on a laptop or desktop. So visit photos.google.com and log in.
- Use the search functions! Google’s image recognition and tagging means you can easily find photos of things (e.g: “cats”) or places (e.g: Greece). But it’s more useful than that, as it can also search by type.
If you type in “screenshots”, for example, it’ll bring up most screenshots you’ve taken on your phone that are no longer need. Similarly, if you type in “animations”, you’ll bring up all those GIFs automatically backed up from WhatsApp.
- Remember videos are the biggest space sink. So do a search for ‘video’ and be brutal. This can also catch GIFs that have been converted to mp4 files (iPhones seem especially prone to this conversion).
- Delete things in bulk. Don’t waste time ticking each item one by one: tick the first one, then hold down the ‘shift’ key and move your mouse to cover all the items you want to delete, as they turn blue.
If you have a lot of photos to delete in one go (all your GIFs, for example), you can tick the first one, then scroll to the bottom of the page and then press ‘shift’ taking in hundreds or thousands of files at once. Once you’ve selected everything, press the bin button at the top of the page to remove it all.
- To save Photos space in future, set image backup quality to “Storage saver.” You can do this by pressing the cog in the top right of the browser to bring up the settings.
How to clear space in Gmail
Although Google will tell you the largest emails in your inbox, that’s not much help if they’re essential and you need to dig deeper. Here, it pays to know Google’s slightly archaic search strings:
- Emails with attachments are the biggest for obvious reasons. Type “has:attachment” in the search bar to find them all.
- If you want to be more focused, you can zoom in on just the large emails with the size function. Try “size:5MB” to bring up all emails that are 5MB or more in size (obviously you can change this number to whatever you like).
- If you just want to delete old emails, you can specify time ranges with “before” or “after”. For example: “before:2020/12/31” will bring up every email that arrived in your inbox before the 31st of December 2020 (note the American date format).
- And, of course, you can find emails to delete by the sender as well. Just type their email address into the search bar and all of their emails will appear.
Once you’ve deleted all of these, remember that they sit in your Gmail trash for 30 days. You can accelerate this by going to the Trash menu and selecting “Empty Trash Now”.
How to clear space in Google Drive
Google Drive itself is pretty straightforward, as you can simply see everything listed by size by visiting the Quota page.
But if that’s not helpful, you can always search by file type. Just write “type:audio” or “type:video” to track down files that are typically larger in size.
Remember that items shared with you don’t count towards your storage allowance, so there’s no need to clear them out.
If all else fails, pay for more space
If you really can’t part with your files in the cloud, Google’s prices for storage are pretty reasonable — especially as you can share them with up to five other people, so can split the cost between friends.
The Basic package costs £1.59 per month and gives you 100GB of space. For £2.49, you can double that to 200GB — and it also gives you 3 per cent cashback on purchases made in the Google Store.
For £7.99 per month, you can up that to a whopping 2TB of storage — around 133 times the storage you get with a free account. This also comes with 10 per cent cashback in the Google Store and access to Google’s own VPN for private browsing.
