If you’ve been backing up photos for free on Google Photos, that will soon end this year. While there are many other alternatives, you may already have lots of memories uploaded to Google Photos and don’t really feel like moving to another service or platform.
If that’s the case, you probably want to free up your Google storage space as much as you can, before having to pay the monthly subscription to get more storage space.
The easiest way is to go to Google One Storage Manager (make sure you are already logged in to any of the Google services).
Here you’ll see a summary of how much free space you can claim on your Google Account, i.e large files and attachments that you can delete to free up more space. Just click on the “Review and clear xxx” link, which will take you to a more detailed list of files and emails containing the large attachments/files.
The trickier bit is Gmail because I find that it can have emails with large attachments but sometimes the emails themselves are large (usually due to the email signatures being embedded on the emails themselves).
For searching emails with large attachments, you can use “has:attachment larger:10M” to find all emails with attachments larger than 10 MB.
For searching big emails, you can use “size:10485760” to find all emails greater than 10 MB, or “size:104857600” for 100 MB. However, one of the emails in Google One Storage Manager is 300MB in size but when I tried searching this way on Gmail, it didn’t show up. So I’m not sure if this one actually works all the time.
So what happens if you want to remove the attachments and email signatures but still want to keep the email? I don’t see the options in Gmail but you can forward the email to yourself, and in the draft, remove all the signatures manually. Then, delete all your previous conversations of that email – except the last one where you forward the messages to yourself. You should still be able to see the conversations thread, but with the removed attachments and signatures.
Hopefully these tips can help you to free up space on Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos
