How I freed up 20GB of Google Photos storage with 5 simple steps

I have a Google One subscription, so I get more than the standard 15GB of free storage on my Google Account. However, this doesn’t mean I want to spend even more on a service I only started using because Google promised unlimited free storage for compressed images. As I watched my storage quota pass the halfway mark for my current 100GB plan, I decided it was time to take action.

But Google doesn’t exactly make it easy to manage your Google Photos images and videos. Besides bulk deletion and compression, you mostly have to sort through your files yourself.

So, I set up a process to make it easier to do — and by following these steps, I cleared out thousands of items from my storage and freed up over 20GB of space.

With over 47,000 items backed up in Google Photos, I knew I had to set my priorities before jumping in. Luckily, I knew there were a bunch of items I could ignore — those that don’t count towards my account storage.

While Google pulled a bait-and-switch by ending its free storage promise after getting people like me hooked on the product, there was some consolation. Items added before the June 1, 2021, deadline using the Storage Saver option would not count towards my Google Account storage.

Clearing some of these images may make my account neater and make searches less overwhelming, but it would do nothing to help my goal of clearing up storage. So from the get-go, I ignored anything uploaded before that date. This helped me prioritize what was actually important for freeing up storage.

Rather than manually scrolling through my gallery and deciding which images to delete, I started with my screenshots folder. This presented an easy win — most of my screenshots were for articles I completed years ago or memes I had sent to friends. This folder was particularly packed for the years I did a lot of software tutorials or mobile game reviews.

Using my PC, I selected screenshots in chunks to remove them. I found the process easiest on the Google Photos website because it gave me access to a larger screen and let me use a keyboard shortcut to select multiple items at once.

I kept screenshots for some of the recent articles I’ve written, just in case I need to reference them. But I lined up anything older than a few months for the chopping block. When I was done, I had removed around 3,000 screenshots and freed up around 2GB of space.

Google Photos doesn’t offer a tool to identify duplicate photos, which would honestly be really helpful for clearing out your storage. However, the stacking feature does group together similar images.

There are a few drawbacks, though. Stacks sometimes group quite different photos together, so you have to really check each image to see which ones you want to save. The process of saving a specific photo and deleting the rest isn’t as seamless as it could be. In addition, the stacking feature appears differently across devices. When using the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, I could simply enable a toggle that popped up. On my HONOR 400 Pro, the feature needs to be enabled in a separate menu.

When I found a photo I liked better than the rest in the stack, I chose to keep it and delete the rest. Other times, I unstacked items that were significantly different from one another. Sometimes I had to separately delete images within a stack because more than one stood out as a top pick. This was the most time-consuming part of the process, but I managed to remove over 800 photos and clear up around 3GB of storage.

If you want to quickly reduce your Google Photos storage, this is one of the most efficient ways to do it. While Google doesn’t offer tools for identifying duplicates, you can use the Google One storage manager to easily find large files in your Google Photos account.

To access this storage manager in Google Photos, tap your account icon, then tap Clean up space. Scroll down on the next screen to the option labeled Large photos and videos, then select Review. If you’re using the website, simply click your storage quota on the left side of the screen, then select Large photos and videos.

While I expected my storage manager to include many high-resolution images from review devices, it actually mostly consisted of videos. The largest file by itself was 2.3GB, with most being around 200MB to 500MB.

I found the process easiest to go through using the website on my PC. I checked which videos I wanted to keep and removed the ones I had backed up to other drives or no longer needed. I removed a lot of videos of product unboxings, which added up to a significant amount of space. In total, going through this process removed over 8.5GB of storage.

I knew that videos would contribute significantly to my Google Photos storage, especially because I always record in 1080p at 60fps. If you record at a higher resolution, videos could take up even more space. While I had cleared up my largest videos from my Google Photos, I knew there were hundreds more still lingering. So, I headed over to my videos folder to see what else I could get rid of.

These clips weren’t identified by Google’s storage manager because they were only a few seconds long. However, there were hundreds of them. I hoard videos and images of my cats, so I focused on videos I knew I could get rid of quickly without having to manually check each one to see if it was important. These included unboxings, clips from software tutorials, social media videos I had accidentally backed up, and short clips that I had used for my Instagram account.

Overall, I deleted over 500 items, which recovered over 9.4GB of storage. If you’ve accidentally backed up your TikTok or WhatsApp folder, this step will give you significant storage savings.

My Google Account storage is now back under the halfway mark, with the process freeing up around 23GB of storage space in Google Photos. It’s not enough for me to stop paying for Google One, but it does give me more time to implement a self-hosted solution without needing to upgrade to a higher tier in the meantime.

Rather than waiting for your own storage to creep up to the next tier, I recommend trying out these tricks to help you get your Google Photos quota under control. However, it really is time that Google made it easier to manage the many items users have backed up to the service.