How to get more space on your Google storage

For many of us, Google storage is the modern hard drive. It is the place where our most important thoughts, documents and memories reside. But, just like with a traditional hard drive, space is not infinite and running out of space can be a real problem.

By default, Google offers 15 GB of space to use on everything associated with your account. (If you have a paid G Suite account, your limit is likely to be higher.) This includes content connected to Gmail, Google Drive, and all Google Photos saved after June 1st. Needless to say, data is growing rapidly.

You can check your current storage status by visiting this page and, if you need to, you can buy more space there too, for just $ 2 a month for an extra 100 GB. But spending more money may not be necessary. A quick round of old-fashioned household chores can be enough to clean your virtual cobwebs and give you ample room to grow. Here’s how to do it.

Delete Drive debris

Google Drive is a common place for files that take up a lot of space to increase and deplete your quota, but organizing things doesn’t take long.

• Open this link, which will show you a list of all your Drive files sorted by size, with the biggest items at the top
• Analyze the heaviest criminals and delete everything you no longer need
• Click the gear icon in the top right corner of the Drive and select “Settings”, followed by “Manage applications”
• For any application that has a note about hidden data, click the gray “Options” box on the right and select “Delete hidden application data”

Apps associated with Google Drive storage can sometimes have hidden data, but it only takes a few clicks to remove it.

Free up photo storage

Unless you have a Pixel smartphone (in this case, you will, for now, retain the unlimited “high quality” option), as of June 1, 2021, all photos and videos stored on Google Photos will count against your Google storage. If you’re saving photos in their original sizes, you can free up tons of space by converting them to Google’s “high quality” option, which compresses images in 16 MP and videos in 1080p (a change that will hardly be noticeable to most of people and purposes).

• Go to the Photos settings page and select “High quality (free unlimited storage)”
• When making this selection, you will be asked if you want to switch to the “high quality” format and compress your existing photos. If there are any photos that you don’t want to compress, click on the “Learn how to keep the original files” link for instructions on how to save those photos to your device.

Say goodbye to Gmail trash

E-mails do not take up much space, but do you know what they do? Attachments. You probably have a lot of old attachments in your Gmail account that you don’t really need.

Here’s how to fix it:

• Go to the Gmail website and type “has: largest attachment: 10M” in the search box at the top
• Identify all messages with disposable attachments and delete them. (Unfortunately, there is no great way to get rid of an attachment without deleting the associated email, but you can always forward a message to yourself and manually remove the attachment before removing the original.)
• Open your spam folder and click on the link “Delete all spam messages now”
• Open the Trash folder and select “Empty Trash now” to send it away forever

Feeling lighter is liberating, isn’t it?

February 17, 2021 update, 10:37 am ET: This article was originally published on March 19, 2019. The information in Google Photos has been updated.