For large numbers of us, Google stockpiling is the advanced hard drive. It’s where our most significant contemplations, archives, and recollections live. In any case, much the same as with a customary hard drive, the space isn’t endless, and running out of room can be a genuine issue.
Of course, Google gives you 15GB of space to use for everything related with your record. (In the event that you have a paid G Suite account, your cutoff’s conceivable higher.) That incorporates content associated with Gmail, Google Drive, and all Google Photos saved after June first. Obviously, information includes quick.
You can check your present stockpiling status by visiting this page, and when it’s all said and done, you can buy more space there, as well, for just $2 per month for an extra 100GB. Be that as it may, dishing out more cash probably won’t be essential. A speedy round of antiquated housekeeping could be sufficient to clean up your virtual webs and give yourself plentiful space to develop. Here’s the means by which to do it.
Delete Drive debris
Google Drive is a common place for space-sucking files to build up and wear down your quota, but tidying things up doesn’t take long.
- Open this link, which will show you a list of all of your Drive files sorted by size with the largest items at the top
- Look through the heftiest offenders and delete anything you no longer need
- Click the gear-shaped icon in Drive’s upper-right corner, and select “Settings,” followed by “Manage Apps”
- For any apps that have a note about hidden data, click the gray “Options” box to the right, and select “Delete hidden app data”
Apps associated with your Google Drive storage can sometimes have hidden data, but all it takes is a couple of clicks to remove it.
- Open your Drive Trash folder and click on the “Empty trash” link at the top of the page
Free up Photos storage
Unless you currently have a Pixel phone (in which case, you will, for now, keep the unlimited “high quality” option), as of June 1st, 2021, every photo and video backed up to Google Photos is going to count against your Google storage. If you’ve been saving photos at their original sizes, you can free up tons of space by converting them to Google’s “high-quality” option, which compresses images down to 16MP and videos to 1080p (a change that’s unlikely to be noticeable for most people and purposes).
- Go to the Photos settings page, and select “High quality (free unlimited storage)”
- When you make that selection, you’ll be asked whether you want to switch to the “high quality” format and compress your existing photos. If there are any photos you don’t want to compress, click on the “Learn how to keep original files” link for instructions on saving those photos to your device.
Say goodbye to Gmail junk
Emails don’t take up a ton of space, but you know what does? Attachments. Odds are, you’ve got plenty of old attachments sitting in your Gmail account that you don’t really need.
Here’s how to address that:
- Go to the Gmail website and type “has:attachment larger:10M” into the search box at the top
- Identify any messages with disposable attachments and delete them. (There’s no great way to get rid of an attachment without also deleting the associated email, unfortunately, but you can always forward a message back to yourself and manually remove the attachment before axing the original.)
- Open your Spam folder, and click the link to “Delete all spam messages now”
- Open your Trash folder, and select “Empty Trash now” to send everything away for good
Feeling lighter is liberating, isn’t it?
