How to get more space on 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 isn’t infinite and running out of space can be a real problem.

By default, Google gives you 15 GB of space to use on everything associated with your account. This includes content connected to Gmail, Google Drive, and all Google Photos (except those saved before June 1, 2021). Needless to say, the data adds up quickly.

You can check your current storage status by visiting This pageand if push comes to shove, you can also buy more space there, for just $2 per month for an additional 100 GB. But shelling out more money may not be necessary. A quick round of old-fashioned housework might be enough to clear your virtual cobwebs and give you ample room to grow. Here’s how to do it.

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

• Open this linkwhich will show a list of all Drive files sorted by size, with the largest items at the top.
• Examine the most serious offenders and delete anything that is no longer needed.
• Click the gear-shaped icon in the top-right corner of Drive and select settingsfollowed by Manage applications.
• Sometimes apps associated with Google Drive storage may contain hidden data, but it only takes a few clicks to remove it. For any app that has a note about hidden data, click the gray icon options box on the right and select Delete hidden app data.

• Open your Drive Trash folder and click the “Empty trash” link at the top of the page.

Unless you currently have a Pixel phone model 5 or earlier (in which case you will retain the unlimited “Storage Saver” option for now), all photos and videos backed up to Google Photos after June 1, 2021 will count towards your Google Storage. If you saved photos in their original sizes, you can free up a lot of space by converting them to Google’s “Storage Saver” option (which used to be called “High Quality”). This compresses images to 16 MP and videos to 1080p (a change that is it will hardly be noticeable for most people and purposes).

• I go to the Photo Settings Page and select Storage Saver.
• If you change to Storage Saver, your previous photos will not be automatically compressed. To do this, on the Photos settings page, look for the “Reclaim Storage” button, which will compress many (but not all) of your existing videos and photos. (Check the list at Google support page to see which images will be affected.)

Another useful feature is the Manage storage page, which you access by tapping Store at the bottom of the left column. This will take you to a page that will tell you approximately how much time you have left before filling your storage space and offer to find (and delete) blurry photos, screenshots, and other possibly unwanted images that are taking up space.

Emails don’t 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 resolve this:

• 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’s no great way to get rid of an attachment without also deleting the associated email, but you can always forward a message to yourself and manually remove the attachment before deleting the original.)

If you’re like me, you tend to ignore most, if not all, of the emails that land in your Promotional folder. While each promotional email may not take up much space, they can add up over the weeks (or months).

• If you just want to get rid of all the clutter, go to the Promotions section and click on the little checkbox just below the search field and then Select all [number] conversations in Promotions > Clear selection.
• If you would prefer to remove specific promotions, open one of the emails from the company you no longer want to hear from. After clicking on Unsubscribe button next to the email address (because you don’t want to receive any more of those, right?), go to the right of the address, click the three dots and then click Filter messages like this > Search. You can then use the above method to get rid of all emails from that merchant.

And of course, these instructions can also be used with any other Gmail folder.

Now you can discard everything completely.

• Open yours Spam folderand click the link to Delete all spam messages now.
• Open yours Trash Folderand select Empty Trash now send everything away forever.

Feeling lighter is liberating, isn’t it?

Update May 1, 2024, 10:41am ET: This article was originally published on March 19, 2019. Information about Google Drive and Google Photos has been updated and information about filtering has been added.