How do you free up space in Google Photos on mobile? Here's how to recover Google storage space when it's full! This is my step-by-step guide to solving the google photos storage full problem with 5 things you can do right now on your mobile phone. If your back up is full or out of storage, there might be something here which will help you bring your space back down to under 15GB.
I'll try changing the back up from original size to storage saver, easily search and remove any unwanted photos and reducing all the photos and videos in my Google Photos app to storage saver size.
FREE UP Google Photos storage on your phone
TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)
THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!
Hello I'm Neil, welcome back to the Happy Hut: this is so frustrating...
Is your Google photos suddenly full?
You are getting warnings and error messages like these, telling us that it stopped backing up photos and videos... Even worse than that, it's shut down our Gmail!
This is happening to me right now, so I'm going to show you quick things you can do right now on your phone to bring your Google photo storage back under the 15 gigabyte limit.
I'll also show you how you can keep it under that limit without deleting all your photos and videos, or more importantly without giving Google any money whatsoever.
You know Google? The most profitable company on planet Earth? Yeah that Google, that really wants us to buy some storage.
You and I both know that buying storage from Google isn't a good idea because it will mean a monthly fee for the rest of our lives!
And Google can increase that fee anytime they want to while they still hold on to our data and sell that to advertisers.
We do not need to be giving Google a monthly subscription, so let's dive in with tip number one.
So the first thing we're going to do is to change the Google photos upload size from original quality to “storage saver” quality.
You might have done this already but just let's make sure that that setting is set to storage saver because sometimes when the Google photos app updates it switches it back to “Original”.
So we're going to click on the avatar on the top right hand corner of your Google photos.
Don't click on “free up device storage” because that is just going to remove photos from your phone.
We don't want to do that. We don't need to do that.
What we are going to do though is go down to photos settings.
We click on that and then we'll click on backup and sync, which is the first menu item here.
If we scroll down we can see “upload size” and there are two ways that you can backup photos to Google photos: that is either “original size” which is the full fat big size of your photos and video...
Or this option here: “storage saver”.
Honestly I've been using storage saver for years now. I haven't noticed any difference and if you do want to keep the original resolution of your photos and videos, you can be backing them up to your computer.
It really does make a difference with the file sizes as we'll find out on one of my tips in a moment! So I'm going to choose “storage saver”.
Tip number two is that we're going to turn off Google photos backup.
And to do that we're going to click on the Avatar in the top right hand corner again.
We're going to scroll down to “photos settings” and then we're going to click on backup and sync.
There’s a little toggle switch here: we're going to turn that off and the reason we're doing this is that once we've cleared some space from Google photos we don't want to be filling up Google photos with the pictures that are in our phone again.
And later on I'm going to show you how you can set up a Google account just for your photos and videos.
The third tip is to remove any obviously unwanted Google photos and videos.
Click on the Avatar in the top right hand corner, and down underneath the “account storage full" you can see this button with three dots.
I'll just click on it and that takes us to the “out of storage” window.
There's a section down here called "review and delete” and this is where it offers to show you screenshots, blurry photos, large photos and videos, and other apps.
Now I don't particularly want to delete these, but there might be some big ones here that you can delete.
You can see from the sizes here aren't huge and I don't think they'll bring me back underneath the storage limit, which brings us to tip number four, and this this is the killer tip.
This is how you and me are going to beat Google, and it's to reduce the size of all the photo and video files in Google photos just in one go.
Now you can't do this on the Google photos app, which I think is pretty disgusting, so what we need to do is to open a browser on your phone.
If you have an Android phone that's probably Chrome, and if you have an iPhone or an iPad that's Safari, and we'll type in photos.google.com
Next on the top left hand side, you see the three lines there?
We click on that to open the menu just to make sure that we are logged into the correct Google account.
You can click on the Avatar face there if you want to change the accounts.
Next we'll scroll down, and down here where it says storage we're going to click on the word “storage" and this is like manage storage on the app...
But if you scroll down, the app doesn't have this option: “recover storage”.
And by the way if any of these tips are helping, please say hi in the comments or hit the thumbs up button. It really helps other people to find this video so thank you.
On the “recover storage” option here, we're going to click on “learn more" and it opens up this scary warning.
Now we don't know which photos and videos in Google photos are at the big original size or the smaller storage saver size. By clicking on this option, it will reduce all of the photos and video file sizes down to the storage saver size, which will free up loads of space.
I'm going to click this warning disclaimer here: I understand that it cannot be undone...
and then I'm going to hit the blue "compress existing photos and videos”
Now it looks like nothing has happened... look our storage is still at 16.3GB
If I scroll back down it says compressing.
It does take a couple of hours, let's see how this fixes my Google storage!
It's now 8:30... 7 hours later. Let's open Google photos app.
We were on 16 gigabytes. If I click on my avatar, whoa! Look at that!
Account storage 7.8 gigabytes!
We did it! Woah, we did it! So for me this tip reclaimed about eight gigabytes of storage, but more importantly it's got my whole Google account working again!
But that's not all, because we can now keep it off.
Because tip 5 is to create a Google account just for your photos and videos.
I've got a video all about that, it's right here. You'll never run out of free Google storage again and you can create a new Google account for every year. You could create one for every month if you wanted. The step-by-step instructions are right there or in the link that's in the description below. In your face Google!
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