Declutter and save: Clearing your Google Drive and Gmail can help cut costs

• Google Drive and Gmail offer a combined free storage space of 15GB, which can quickly get filled up.
• Deleting large files first can help free up space, and arranging files by size can be done on desktop and mobile devices.
• Check out different ways to declutter and save space on Gmail, Google Photos and more.

Google's services such as Google Drive and Gmail, come with a combined free storage space of only 15GB, which can quickly get filled up. When you approach the limit, Google suggests purchasing additional storage, but you can actually declutter and save money.

Here are some steps to free up storage space on both desktop and mobile devices. It's recommended that one performs this task on the desktop for better file management and organization.

Delete large files first

To make room in your Google Drive and Gmail, you can delete a few specific items instead of multiple smaller files. To do this, you can sort each service by file size and start by deleting one or two larger files.

Here's how you can delete files based on the size in Google Drive on your desktop.

• Log into your Google Drive account.
• After signing in, navigate to the left-hand side of the screen and select ‘Storage’ from the menu.
• Upon accessing the Storage page, your files should appear in descending order from largest to smallest. However, if they're not in that order, you can click on ‘Storage Used’ on the right side of the screen to sort them accordingly.
• Select the large files that you want to remove by clicking on them, and then either click the trash bin icon located at the top right corner of your screen or drag the selected files to the ‘Trash’ option on the left-hand side of your screen.
• Click Trash to go to the Trash menu.
• Click Empty Trash in the top-right corner of your screen.
• Click Delete forever and your files are gone.

This can also be done using the Google Drive app, here's how-

• Launch the Google Drive app and sign in to your account.
• Click on the ‘Files’ icon located at the bottom-right corner of your screen.
• Select ‘Name’ located under ‘My Drive’ at the top of your screen.
• Tap on "Storage Used". This will sort your files by size, with the largest ones appearing at the top.
• Tap the three dots (...) next to the item you want to delete.
• Tap Remove.
• Tap on the hamburger icon situated in the top-left corner of your screen, next to the ‘Search in Drive’ option.
• Tap Trash.
• Tap the three dots (...) in the top-right corner of the screen.
• Tap Empty trash.

Deleting and arranging files based on size can also be done in Gmail on the desktop. Here's how-

• Log into your Gmail account.
• Enter ‘has:attachment larger:10MB’ in the search bar and hit ‘Search.’ This will display all the emails that have attachments larger than 10 MB in descending order. You can modify the search criteria by changing the file size to any other value.
• Select the checkboxes located to the left of each email that you wish to remove, and then click on the trash icon situated in the top-right corner of your screen.
• Click on "Trash" located on the left-hand side of your screen. In case you don't see it, click on "More" and the Trash option should be visible in the expanded menu.
• Once in Trash, click Empty trash now at the top of the screen.

Below are the steps to arrange and delete files by size in the Gmail app-

• Open your Gmail app and log into your account.
• Enter ‘has:attachment larger:10MB’ in the search bar and click on ‘Search.’ This will display all emails that have attachments larger than 10MB, with the largest ones appearing at the top.
• Tap into the email you want to delete.
• Click on the trash bin icon located at the top-right corner of your screen.
• Tap < in the top-left corner of your screen.
• Click on the hamburger icon located in the top-left corner of the screen, next to the ‘Search in mail’ option.
• Tap Trash and then tap on Empty trash now.

Clean up your Google Photos

Google Photos is also included in the 15GB of free storage that Google offers to its users. Since photos and videos can occupy more space than text-based files, it's a good practice to review and delete old media files to free up storage space.

However, unlike Google Drive and Gmail, there is no feature to arrange your photos and videos by size in Google Photos. Therefore, you will have to manually go through your photos and videos to select and delete the ones that you no longer need.

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