{
  "id": 6544890,
  "title": "Reclaim gigabytes from Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos in just a few minutes",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/10/reclaim-gigabytes-from-google-drive-gmail-and-photos-in-just-a-few",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-09-10T04:30:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91598699/free-up-space-gmail-google-drive-google-photos"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Google's storage warnings can be a nuisance, prompting users to upgrade their service to avoid losing their data. The instinct is often to pay for more space so they can continue using their cloud services without interruption. However, this approach is akin to renting a larger storage unit instead of decluttering and organizing what they already have.\n\nBefore expanding your storage, it's worth taking a few minutes to clean up your Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos accounts. By focusing on these key services, you can quickly reclaim significant amounts of space.\n\nTo start, visit drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota. This link opens a view that displays all files in your Google Drive, sorted by size in descending order. Look for any files that are no longer needed and delete them. Removing these large files could free up a substantial amount of storage immediately.\n\nAnother major source of storage consumption is Gmail. Emails with large attachments, especially old ones, can take up a lot of room. To find these emails, use the search bar and enter the operator \"has:attachment larger:10M\". This will show all messages containing files larger than 10 megabytes. Select the emails you wish to remove, hit delete, and continue on your way.\n\nIf you're using Google Photos and find that the service is consuming a significant portion of your storage quota, there's a way to recover space without deleting your photos. Go to photos.google.com/settings on a desktop browser and click \"Recover storage\". This feature will compress your existing high-resolution photos and 4K videos down to 16MP and 1080p quality, respectively. The compression process won't degrade the visual quality too much, but it can recover a significant amount of gigabytes of space.\n\nFinally, remember that simply deleting files in Google Drive or Gmail doesn't free up space right away. Those items are moved to the Trash folder and remain there for 30 days. To ensure you've truly reclaimed the storage, go to Drive Trash and click \"Empty trash\". Repeat this process for Gmail and Google Photos to ensure all your unwanted data is permanently purged.",
  "summary": "Few automated emails trigger a micro-headache quite like the dreaded cloud storage warning: “Your storage is 95 percent full. Upgrade now or risk losing access to everything you hold dear. ” The natural impulse is to hand over your credit card for the next storage tier. It costs a couple of bucks a month, it solves the immediate problem, and you can get back to work. But doing that is the digital…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}