Google Photos/Storage is full. What do I do?

Google Storage is your photos, emails and documents stored in the Google Cloud. Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive share the same storage. There is an initial free quota of 15GB. If you want to store more, you must pay. Old photographs uploaded before June 2021, meeting a maximum resolution requirement, are stored without incurring costs. From June 2021 all your photos uploaded to Google Photo use the storage quota.

Several people, including myself, are meeting this quota. What should we do?

First, I wanted to find out my storage usage and needs. One way to do that is downloading all the photos, and that can be done at Google Takeout. The “takeout” process takes a while. After placing the “takeout” order, I received an email with links to 86 files, each 2 GB, which is the maximum download size.

I downloaded each fil; it took a while. I also created a PowerShell script (with the help of AI/GitHub Copilot) to check that I did not forget to download any files, and extracted the contents from the files to a common folder. Upon reviewing the contents of that folder, I discovered that it contained over 100,000 photos, occupying approximately 170 GB of storage. 155 GB of data were uploaded before 2021, which qualifies for free storage.

Having a local copy/backup of the pictures is always OK. I put the images on a disk and labelled it properly. We should all do this at regular intervals.

But what should I do for managing photographs? The options are:

  • delete photos newer than 2021 to free up space. It is cheap but it does not actually solve the problem.
  • manage photos locally. This is possible but requires effort and investments.
  • rent more storage from Google.
  • rent more storage from other vendors (Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox++)

There is a “lock in” effect in that I can use 155 GB for free (my “old” photos). If I move to another storage service, I will have to pay for that data as well. The pricing seems to be NOK 0,5-3 range for 1 GB per year. The smaller packages cost more.

The most sensible option for me seems to be to:

  • Delete “unneeded” files/videos newer than 2021.
  • Buy more Google Storage if/when I need.
  • Download the photos at regular intervals for backup.