How to stay under your 15 GB of free Google storage

Register for a Google account, and you get 15 GB of cloud storage space for free, spread across three main products: Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. Once you’ve exceeded that limit, you’ll need to sign up for a Google One storage plan, which starts at $ 1.99 per month for 100GB of space.

As long as you know how you are using your free storage and don’t have a mass of files to store in the cloud, you can stay in that 15 GB free space. The steps and tips to use vary slightly. between Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos, and we’ve covered them below. To see how much space you are using on each Google product, visit this page and sign in to your account.

It’s worth mentioning that if you go over your 15GB storage limit, your files won’t suddenly disappear. You’ll need to free up space or pay a Google One plan to start adding files again.

Gmail

Individual emails tend not to take up too much space, but if you’ve had your Gmail account for years, you might find that they start to take up a significant amount of storage. One way to clear bridges can be to find and clear older emails: type “older_than: 1y” in the search box at the top of Gmail to search for messages older than a year. You can change the year or switch to months if you wish – “older_than: 3m” or “older_than: 6m” for example.

When your “older than …” emails appear, click the selection box above the left list to select them all, and then click the button Select all conversations that match this search option (this may not appear if your search did not return many results). Click it Wipe off (the trash can icon) and the selected emails are deleted, or rather they are sent to the Trash folder for 30 days and then they are deleted.

Emails with large attachments can also take up a lot of space in your Gmail inbox. In the search box, type “has: attachment Large: 10m” to search for messages with attachments larger than 10 megabytes (you can adjust this number back and forth if you want). As before, click the selection box at the top left to select all the emails you found, then click Wipe off to get rid of them.