How to manage your Google photos or move them elsewhere

Now that Google will soon start counting everything you uploaded to Google Photos towards your storage limit, which reaches 15 GB for a free plan, it is worth doing a personal audit. How much space am I using? How can I extend my free plan as much as possible? And how can I transfer my photos to a completely different service if I decide to abandon ship?

Do not worry. We have answers to all three questions, and none of them pose much of a problem.

How much space am I using on Google Photos?

This one is easy. Click on hereand you will see how much space you have left on the Google storage tier you are using (free or paid). Google divides your storage usage by app, so you can quickly see if you need to roll up your sleeves and browse your vast Gmail inbox or maybe just delete a few gigantic files on Google Drive.

How long do I have before I have filled my Google storage quota?

The answer to this depends on how much you upload to Google’s services, of course. To help you figure this out, Google published a tool which takes into account your current download and / or save habits, and tries to predict when you will run out of space if you continue to use Google services as you normally do.

How do I reduce the amount of space I use in Google Photos?

It’s likely that your Google Photos account uses more space than Google Drive or Gmail, especially if you’ve imported “Original Quality” content to take advantage of Google’s old “unlimited” offer.

Visit Google Photos » settings and see if there are any unsupported videos that you can delete, movies that Google just can’t convert for some reason. Download and / or delete them. Then, consider clicking “Recover Storage” to convert all of your “Original Quality” content to “High Quality” content, which should free up a lot of the content. the space you’ve used so far in Google Photos.

After that make sure you are using the latest version of Google Photos on your Android or iPhone. Launch the app, tap Library, then press Utilities. Here, Google will give you lots of photo suggestions that you might want to get rid of, like the screenshots you took, for example. Otherwise, check back regularly. They will be there.

If you stick with Google Photos until June of next year, Google plans to release a tool this gives you even more useful suggestions for photos that you might want to delete. This will include content like huge videos that take up much more space than they should in your Google storage. or blurry photos that you wouldn’t want to keep anyway.

YesYou don’t have to delete anything now, unless you have stored it in “Original quality, “Or” photos larger than 16 MP and videos larger than 1080p. You can’t search Google Photos by megapixels, alas, but you can at least get a head start on videos that take up a lot of space.

Go to the site and enter any common file type for videos: “avi”, “mp4”, “mov”, and so on. This should return the videos you downloaded in the results, and you can browse them all to download and archive anything you want to remove from the cloud.

How to start moving your Google photos elsewhere

If Google’s decision prompts you to look for a different accommodation a service, you are probably also eager to find a quick and easy way to upload all your photos and videos elsewhere. Please do not try to download them manually from the Google Photos website. You will be there forever.

Instead, just pull up Google Takeout in the web browser of your choice. Deselect everything, then go back and select the “Google Photos” option. Choose a delivery method for your files, as well as the options for the archives that you will get, then start the export process. Wait until you get the email from Google, upload all your photos and videos, and upload them somewhere else.

Do not remove them from Google Photos, however. You now have a free backup of your photos which can exist as long as you have a Google account, or at least until Google Althree his agreement again.