How To Easily Free Up Space In Your Google Email, Drive, And Photos

Not managing storage space is one of the biggest mistakes people make with cloud storage. The 15GB of free cloud storage that you get with your Google account is very valuable, and if this isn't managed properly, you can lose out on incoming emails and shared files. Google recently changed this to only 5GB  for new accounts unless you link a phone number to it. The 15GB was already difficult to manage, and now, with only 5GB of shared storage, it might seem inevitable that you'll run out of space.

You can increase this storage to the usual 15GB by adding your phone number and further increase it by paying for extended storage. Fortunately, for those not wanting to do either — or for those who have run out of their 15GB storage — there's still an easy way to free up space in Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. To do this, go to Google One Storage Manager, where you get a number of options on how to effectively clear storage space.

Your Google account's space is shared between Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos — the icons for some of which have been recently redesigned. You can see exactly how much storage each service takes when you open the page. From there, you can go through Google's recommended steps on freeing up storage. You can find and delete large files in Drive, unwanted images and videos that take up tons of space in Photos, and emails with sizeable attachments and spam in Gmail.

Apart from the options immediately visible in the Google One Storage Manager page, you can see even more options to free up storage space for each specific service, be it Gmail, Google Drive, or Google Photos. In Gmail and Google Drive, you can delete items in the Trash, since they count toward total storage until they're permanently deleted. In Google Photos, you can delete unsupported and corrupted image and video files.

You have even more options of clearing space inside each app. In Gmail, you can clear Socials, Promotions, and Updates alongside clearing your Spam and Trash. You can also go through specific emails to delete the ones you don't need, such as those from a long time ago. To make this easier, you can use modifiers in the search bar. You can specify emails from a long time ago by searching "older_than:" and specifying the year, such as "older_than:1y", or "before:" and adding a specific date. This can also be done with file size, using "larger:" and specifying the size, such as "larger:1mb".

In Google Drive, you can navigate to Storage in the sidebar to see all your files sorted by size. You can delete the ones that you don't need or ones that have image files or graphics inside them. Files shared with you don't count toward your storage, but any copies you make do. You can search for such files and delete those as well.

Like Gmail and Google Drive, Google Photos offers users many ways of easily managing storage space. You can browse through what the app labels as "Screenshots" and "Archived" to delete pictures that you might've taken for one-time use, or search up terms like "blurry" to manually delete images that you won't be using.

There are certain things you can do to ensure your storage doesn't fill up as quickly in the future as well. Photos and videos take significantly more storage space than emails and documents, so Google Photos is most likely to fill up your account. If you don't want to free up your memory as frequently, you can turn off backup to have more space available for the other apps.

If you don't want to completely stop backing up your photos and videos, you can configure exactly what folders get backed up, since you might not want your screenshots to take up valuable storage space. Similarly, ensuring that your large video files don't get backed up is another way of preserving storage space. Another Google Photos feature that many don't know about is built-in file compression. You can click on the settings icon inside the Photos app or on the browser and configure your backup quality to "Storage saver," which compresses the items you back up to save space.