Sweep out emails with large attachments PA Images via Getty Images Google recently changed its policy so that items in the bin are automatically cleared after 30 days, which is handy if you forget to chuck the trash out yourself. Only then will you get the storage space back. When you’ve finished your clearout, click on the Bin on the left-hand side of the Google Drive menu and choose Empty Bin. If you want to store a copy of files locally before deleting them from Google Drive, you can follow the procedure above, but this time select Download instead of Remove. It’s worth noting that if you’ve uploaded a file to a shared folder and then delete it, others in that share will still have access to the file. If you want to select multiple files, hold down Ctrl (or Command on a Mac) as you select the files you wish to remove, then right click and select Remove. If you don’t need those files anymore, you can right-click on the file and select Remove.

Click that and you’ll be presented with a list of files, sorted in size order. If you go to Google Drive, you should see an option to Manage Storage under your storage quota on the left-hand side. Google DriveĬlearing clutter out of Google Drive has become a little easier recently, although there’s still a lot more that Google could do to make it simpler to jettison unwanted junk. In my case, it saved me 1.7GB of storage. In practice that means photos larger than 16-megapixels are compressed down to that size and videos in higher definition than Full HD (1080p) are brought down to that resolution. This allows you to compress photos and videos from their original quality to what Google describes as “high quality”. If you go to Google Photos and click the Settings cog, you might see an option to Recover Storage.

Note that if you’ve already got photos stored with Google, you might be able to reclaim some free storage space by knocking back the quality slightly. Nevertheless, if you’re Google storage is being swallowed by Gmail/Drive files (and we’ll come to clearing those shortly), then using an alternative for photos will conserve storage space. Various apps offer free photo sync, including Dropbox, Amazon Photo (for Prime members) and Box, but all have storage caps too.

Is google drive free with gmail