Sort Google Drive Files By Size
To find the files consuming the most space in your Google Drive, click the All items option in the sidebar, click the Sort button, and select Quota used. Google Drive will sort your files by the amount of storage space they consume, allowing you to delete the biggest ones you dont want.
Note that deleted files will continue taking up space until you empty your trash. Google will do this automatically every 30 days, but youll want to empty it immediately if you need the space right now.
Where To Store Photos And Videos
If your Google account storage is filling up and Google Photos is the culprit, you can always switch to a different cloud storage option for your photos and videos. But you will also run into the same issue of having to pay for extra storage.
If you use an Apple device and already store data in iCloud, that could be a good landing place for photos. Apple charges $0.99 a month for 50 GB of storage on iCloud+ subscription plans, $2.99 for 200 GB and $9.99 for 2,000 GB. You can buy more storage for your iCloud account from an iPhone or iPad by going to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Manage Storage or iCloud Storage. On a Mac computer, go to the Apple menu > System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud > Manage .
Amazon Prime members get free unlimited full-resolution photo storage, and the company offers some upgraded storage options, too.
Dropbox offers the biggest storage option, with a 3,000 GB Professional plan for $19.99 a month.
And Microsofts OneDrive has personal and family Microsoft 365 plans, both of which come with 1,000 GB per person, along with Office apps like Word and Excel. The personal plan is $6.99 a month, and the family plan is $9.99 a month for up to six people.
Google, Dropbox and Microsoft all offer discounts if you go with a yearly subscription, and the three companies discounts were about equal at around 17 percent.
All Good Things Must End And Free Google Storage Ends At 15 Gb
J.P. McDade has been getting an alarming message at the top of his Gmail inbox: The free storage that came with his Google account is almost used up, and hes not sure where things went wrong.
All I did was receive emails, and now Im dangerously close to not being able to receive them anymore, says McDade, a writer and comedian based in New York City who has been using the free email service from Alphabets Google for about 10 years.
Hes left with a few options. He could go to a different email provider, but he says that would throw his life into a tailspin as contacts and companies send messages to his old address. He could pay Google $2 a month for an additional 85 gigabytes of space, but that would make him feel like a sucker. For now, hes settled on deleting small batches of spam emails every time he gets close to the limit. It takes hours to make even a small dent, he said.
Its like the boat is filling with water and Im using a sippy cup to empty it out little by little, he said, adding that he suspects Google can solve its storage issues without his monetary help.
The change to storage policies and the push toward paid subscriptions was necessary to keep up with growing demand for storage, said a Google spokeswoman. People add more than 4.3 million gigabytes of content to Google accounts every day, the company says.
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Who Needs More Storage
If youre a G Suite administrator, you can check to see how much storage each of the accounts in your organization uses. Login to the admin console , select Users, then look at the list. You can display both Drive usage and Total storage columns. If either of the columns isnt visible, select the three-dot menu to choose which columns appear.
Of course, you can buy additional storage. An administrator can purchase storage space and allocate it to accounts that need it, or an individual Google user also may buy extra storage. If you really need more space, you might upgrade to G Suite Business: For an additional $5 per user per month, every account in your organization can receive unlimited storage. With unlimited storage, you may never need to remove files, delete emails with large attachments, or compress photos again.
Tips To Help Free Up Storage Space On Your Google Account
When you hit your storage limit, follow these best practices to figure out which files, and settings, to change to save space on your G Suite account.
Google says shes out of storage, read the email. How do we figure out whats taking up the space?
A client had somehow filled all 30GB of her G Suite Basic storage space. A standard free Google account user would have hit the limit after storing 15GB of data. When you reach the limit, you wont be able to store items that take up space on Google Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos.
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Delete Previous Versions Of Files
Google Drive stores previous versions of files, and these can consume additional space. If youve been editing a file, you may have previous versions sucking up your storage space.
To check for previous versions, right-click a file and select Manage revisions. Click the X button to delete a previous version and free up space.
Note that Google Drive automatically deletes these old versions every 30 days or when it reaches 100 previous versions, so theres no reason to delete previous versions yourself unless youre desperate for more storage space right now. Theres also no way to delete revisions for multiple files at once, so this may take you a while.
Bear in mind that previous versions of Google Docs files will not consume any space. They dont count towards your quota.
How To Check Google Account Storage
Checking how much storage you have left is as simple as clicking a link. Simply go to . If youre a Google One subscriber, it will automatically redirect to the appropriate page.
Anyone who is using the free Google account storage will see the graphic below. Select View Details to see the full breakdown.
Google One subscribers will see a breakdown similar to this. Select the arrow-box icon next to a section to go directly to that service and manage storage.
Thats all there is to it. In both cases, there are links that will take you to Google One storage plans if you need more storage. This is a nice, simple way to keep tabs on all of the storage youre using.
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How To Check How Much Google Account Storage You Have Left
Joe Fedewa
Joe Fedewa is a Staff Writer at How-To Geek. He has been covering consumer technology for over a decade and previously worked as Managing Editor at XDA-Developers. Joe loves all things technology and is also an avid DIYer at heart. He has written thousands of articles, hundreds of tutorials, and dozens of reviews. Read more…
Every Google account comes with free storage, but if thats not enough for you, more can be purchased. Regardless of how much you have, you probably want to keep tabs on how much youre using. Well show you how.
Google offers two cloud storage options. You can stick with the free 15GB option that every account gets or upgrade to and pay for more. Before we check how much storage you have left, its important to understand what counts toward it.
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Convert Files To Google Docs
is two things. Firstly, its the new location where all your Google Docs document files are stored. Secondly, its a Dropbox-like file storage drive in the cloud. Heres what this means for your storage quota:
- Files in Google Docs format Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings, and Forms dont take up any storage space at all. Youre free to have all the Google Docs files you like.
- Other files from PDFs and images to any other non-Google Docs file type, including Microsoft Word documents will take up storage space in Google Drive.
If you have documents in Microsoft Office or OpenOffice format, you can convert them to Google Docs files to save space. To do so, simply right-click the document in your Google Drive, point to Open with, and select the Google Docs application. Google Docs will create a new copy of that file in Google Docs format, allowing you to erase the original file.
You can also enable the Convert uploaded files to Google Docs format option in the upload dialog to have new documents automatically converted. Note that you may lose some advanced formatting if you do this.
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Trim Your Gmail Storage
Nearly everything in your Gmail account consumes space. Email attachments can be a big culprit, but stored email messages themselves also take up space. Email messages without attachments are just bits of text and dont take up too much space individually but, if you have thousands and thousands of emails, they can add up to a noticeable amount of space.
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Gmail itself doesnt help you free up space. In fact, theres no way to view how much space a message is taking up in Gmail. Weve covered a variety of ways to free up space in Gmail, from searching for emails with attachments to using an IMAP client like Thunderbird that will display exactly how much storage space each email is taking up in Gmail.
Bear in mind that emails in your trash will still take up space. Gmail will automatically delete emails from the trash after 30 days, but youll want to empty your trash immediately if you need the space right now.
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Store Files That Use No Storage Allocation
Converting files you store on Google Drive to native Google Docs formats can save significant space. For example, I uploaded and stored a PowerPoint presentation. When I stored it in the original format, it used 43 MB of my storage allocation. When I converted it to Google Slides format? 0 MB, since native format files dont count toward the limit. Thats true for any file you create in a native Google formatin Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, or Forms. None of these files count toward your storage total on Google Drive.
To save space, you can choose to convert files to a Google Drive format by default when you upload a file to Google Drive. Go to , choose the sprocket below your account image on the right side of the screen, then select Settings. Make sure the box to the left of Convert uploaded files to Google Docs editor format is checked.
What Counts Toward Google Storage
Before Google One, the companys cloud storage went through Google Drive. However, it was never just Google Drive. Gmail and Google Photos also counted toward your storage allotment. To clarify things, Google One was created.
Whether you pay for Google One or not, your storage is spread across three products: Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Heres everything that counts toward your storage:
- Google Drive: Everything in the My Drive section and the Trash folder.
- Gmail: All emails and attachments, including items from Spam and Trash folders.
- Google Photos: All photos and videos stored in Original quality.
Beginning June 1, 2021, however, the following will also count toward your storage:
- All new photos or videos uploaded to .
- New Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard files.
Google One subscribers may have additional things that count toward their storage. For example, Android users can do . Also, if you have family members on your Google One account, theyre using storage as well.
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Cancel Or Downgrade Storage On Your Google One Membership
If you’ve upgraded to Google One, learn how to change your storage or cancel your membership:
If your storage payment has been declined, you’ll need to update your payment information:
Shrink Existing Photos And Delete Bad Ones
You can look over the photos youre storing in and shrink photos larger than 2048×2048 so they wont count towards your quota. Google doesnt provide a very good way to do this online, but if you want to shrink your photos, you could always , locate the ones that are too large in size and shrink them. After deleting the originals from your Google+ photo albums, you could re-upload the shrinked copies and store them for free.
You could also delete photos you dont need theres a good chance you have some bad photos if every photo you take with your smartphone camera is automatically uploaded. By default, such photos will be taken at full size and consume storage space.
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Upload Standard Size Photos
previously known as Picasa Web Albums provides unlimited storage space for photos below a certain resolution.
- If youve signed up for Google+, you can upload photos up to 2048×2048 pixels in size. Photos this size or smaller wont consume any of your Google account storage
- If you havent signed up for Google+, only photos up to 800×800 pixels in size are free.
- Videos of up to 15 minutes can also be stored in Google+ photos without counting towards your storage quota, whether or not youre signed up for Google+.
To control what happens when you upload photos to Google+ Photos from the web, open , scroll down to Photos, and check whether Upload my photos at full size is checked. If this option isnt checked, photos you upload via your browser will be automatically shrunk and consume no storage space. If you check this option, youll have larger photos archived online, but theyll count towards your storage quota.
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If you use the Google+ app on your Android phone and have it set to , youll find that it automatically uploads the photos in full-size mode by default, consuming storage space. If youd rather the app shrunk photos to the standard size first so they can be stored for free, open the Google+ app on your phone, go into Settings, tap Auto Backup , and tap the Photo size option. Select the photo size you prefer.
How To Free Up Storage Space On Your Google Account: The Ultimate Guide
Chris Hoffman
Chris Hoffman is Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. He’s written about technology for over a decade and was a PCWorld columnist for two years. Chris has written for The New York Times and Reader’s Digest, been interviewed as a technology expert on TV stations like Miami’s NBC 6, and had his work covered by news outlets like the BBC. Since 2011, Chris has written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times—and that’s just here at How-To Geek. Read more…
Google accounts now use a shared pool of storage. Every account gets 15 GB of free space, which is shared across your Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ Photos. But certain types of files dont count towards your storage quota.
Luckily, the shared pool of storage means that theres now no point in using hacks that allow you to store personal files in Gmail. You can now take advantage of all your Gmail space for files and photos.
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Store Photos That Use No Storage Allocation
You also may be able to reduce the storage space of photos and videos. Again, in your computers browser, go to . Choose High Quality to allow Google to reduce the file storage size of photos you save to Google Photos on the web.
If you use the Google Photos app on a mobile device , open it, tap the three line menu in the upper left, then choose Settings, then Backup & sync. Look for the Upload size setting. Tap it, then select High Quality .
What If Im Worried About Privacy
Google doesnt have a great privacy track record. For instance, its Chrome browser collects data on you as you click around the Internet to help tailor Google products to your liking and show ads for things youre more likely to buy. Concerns over a Google-run email service have driven some people toward more private email providers.
Proton and Tutanota are two providers that offer free accounts and end-to-end encryption, which means only you and your recipient can see the messages flying back and forth not even the provider in the middle.To set up an account, just follow the links above, click the sign up button, select the free email plan and choose a new email address and unique, hard-to-guess password.
But if youre lazy, busy or above it all, just toss some video files in the trash and carry on. Your Gmail is salvageable and familiar.
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