Google offers 15GB of free cloud storage with every Google Account, but this space is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. When your account gets full, you will stop receiving emails and won’t be able to back up your phone’s photos. Before you start blindly deleting files or paying for a Google One subscription, you should check exactly what is eating up your storage space.
How to View Your Google Storage Breakdown
- Open your web browser and navigate to drive.google.com. Log into your Google Account if prompted.
- In the bottom left corner of the screen, underneath your folders, you will see a small cloud icon and a storage summary (e.g., “12 GB of 15 GB used”).
- Click the Storage button.
- You will be taken to a page that lists every file in your Google Drive, automatically sorted from largest to smallest. This makes it incredibly easy to identify massive video files or old backups.
- To see the full breakdown across all Google services, click the Get more storage or Storage manager link (this will redirect you to Google One).
- Here, you will see a colourful bar chart showing exactly how much space is consumed by Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos individually.
Freeing Up Space Quickly
If Gmail is the culprit, try searching has:attachment larger:10M in your inbox to find and delete emails with massive files attached. If Google Photos is the issue, you can use the Google Photos settings to compress your existing “Original Quality” backups down to “Storage Saver” quality, instantly recovering gigabytes of space.