How to get more space in your Google storage£

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

By default, Google gives you 15GB of space to use for everything associated with your account. That includes content connected to Gmail, Google Drive, and all Google photos (except those saved before June 1st, 2021). Needless to say, data adds up fast.

You can check your current storage status by visiting this page, and if push comes to shove, you can purchase more space there, too, for as little as $2 a month for an extra 100GB. But shelling out more money might not be necessary. A quick round of old-fashioned housekeeping could be enough to clear away your virtual cobwebs and give yourself ample room to grow. Here’s how to do it.

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.
• Apps associated with your Google Drive storage can sometimes have hidden data, but all it takes is a couple of clicks to remove it. For any apps that have a note about hidden data, click the gray Options box to the right, and select Delete hidden app data.

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

Unless you currently have a model 5 or earlier Pixel phone (in which case, you will, for now, keep the unlimited “Storage saver” option), every photo and video backed up to Google Photos after June 1st, 2021, counts 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 “Storage saver” option (which used to be called “High quality”). This 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 Storage saver.
• If you switch to Storage saver, your previous photos won’t automatically be compressed. To do that, on the Photos setting page, look for the “Recover storage” button, which will compress many (but not all) of your existing videos and photos. (Check out the list on Google’s support page to see which images will be affected.)

Another handy resource is the Manage storage page, which you get to by tapping Storage at the bottom of the left column. This will take you to a page that will tell you approximately how much more time you have before you fill up 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 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.)

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

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

And of course, these directions can be used with any other Gmail folder as well.

Now you can completely dispose of it all.

• 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?

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