How to fix Google Photos storage problem on your phone

Hello I'm Neil, welcome back to the  Happy Hut: this is so frustrating...  Is your Google photos suddenly full? You are getting warnings and error   messages like these, telling us that it stopped  backing up photos and videos... Even worse   than that, it's shut down our Gmail! This is happening to me right now,   so I'm going to show you quick things you can  do right now on your phone to bring your Google   photo storage back under the 15 gigabyte limit. I'll also show you how you can keep it under that   limit without deleting all your photos  and videos, or more importantly without   giving Google any money whatsoever. You know Google? The most profitable   company on planet Earth? Yeah that Google,  that really wants us to buy some storage.  You and I both know that buying storage from  Google isn't a good idea because it will mean   a monthly fee for the rest of our lives! And Google can increase that fee anytime   they want to while they still hold on to  our data and sell that to advertisers.  We do not need to be giving  Google a monthly subscription,   so let's dive in with tip number one. So the first thing we're going to do is   to change the Google photos upload size from  original quality to “storage saver” quality.  You might have done this already but just let's  make sure that that setting is set to storage   saver because sometimes when the Google photos  app updates it switches it back to “Original”.  So we're going to click on the avatar on the  top right hand corner of your Google photos.  Don't click on “free up device  storage” because that is just going   to remove photos from your phone. We don't want to do that. We don't   need to do that. What we are going   to do though is go down to photos settings. We click on that and then we'll click on backup   and sync, which is the first menu item here. If we scroll down we can see “upload size” and   there are two ways that you can  backup photos to Google photos:   that is either “original size” which is the  full fat big size of your photos and video...  Or this option here: “storage saver”. Honestly I've been using storage saver   for years now. I haven't noticed any  difference and if you do want to keep the   original resolution of your photos and videos,  you can be backing them up to your computer.  It really does make a difference with the file  sizes as we'll find out on one of my tips in a   moment! So I'm going to choose “storage saver”. Tip number two is that we're going to   turn off Google photos backup. And to do that we're going to click   on the Avatar in the top right hand corner again. We're going to scroll down to “photos settings”   and then we're going to click on backup and sync. There’s a little toggle switch here:   we're going to turn that off and the reason  we're doing this is that once we've cleared   some space from Google photos we don't  want to be filling up Google photos with   the pictures that are in our phone again. And later on I'm going to show you how   you can set up a Google account  just for your photos and videos.  The third tip is to remove any obviously  unwanted Google photos and videos.  Click on the Avatar in the top right hand corner,  and down underneath the “account storage full" you   can see this button with three dots. I'll just click on it and that takes   us to the “out of storage” window. There's a section down here called   "review and delete” and this is where it  offers to show you screenshots, blurry photos,   large photos and videos, and other apps. Now I don't particularly want to delete these,   but there might be some big  ones here that you can delete.  You can see from the sizes here aren't huge and  I don't think they'll bring me back underneath   the storage limit, which brings us to tip  number four, and this this is the killer tip.  This is how you and me are going to beat Google,  and it's to reduce the size of all the photo and   video files in Google photos just in one go. Now you can't do this on the Google photos app,   which I think is pretty disgusting, so what we  need to do is to open a browser on your phone.  If you have an Android phone that's probably  Chrome, and if you have an iPhone or an iPad   that's Safari, and we'll type in photos.google.com Next on the top left hand side,   you see the three lines there? We click on that to open the menu   just to make sure that we are logged  into the correct Google account.  You can click on the Avatar face there  if you want to change the accounts.  Next we'll scroll down, and down here  where it says storage we're going to   click on the word “storage" and this  is like manage storage on the app...  But if you scroll down, the app doesn't  have this option: “recover storage”.  And by the way if any of these tips are  helping, please say hi in the comments   or hit the thumbs up button. It really helps  other people to find this video so thank you.  On the “recover storage” option  here, we're going to click on “learn   more" and it opens up this scary warning. Now we don't know which photos and videos   in Google photos are at the big original  size or the smaller storage saver size. By   clicking on this option, it will reduce all of the  photos and video file sizes down to the storage   saver size, which will free up loads of space. I'm going to click this warning disclaimer here:   I understand that it cannot be undone... and then I'm going to hit the blue "compress   existing photos and videos” Now it looks like nothing has   happened... look our storage is still at 16.3GB If I scroll back down it says compressing.  It does take a couple of hours, let's  see how this fixes my Google storage!  It's now 8:30... 7 hours later.  Let's open Google photos app.  We were on 16 gigabytes. If I click  on my avatar, whoa! Look at that!  Account storage 7.8 gigabytes! We did it! Woah, we did it! So for   me this tip reclaimed about eight gigabytes of  storage, but more importantly it's got my whole   Google account working again! But that's not all,   because we can now keep it off. Because tip 5 is to create a Google   account just for your photos and videos. I've got a video all about that, it's right   here. You'll never run out of free Google storage  again and you can create a new Google account for   every year. You could create one for every month  if you wanted. The step-by-step instructions are  

Channel: Neil Mossey

Views: 102,539

Keywords: Neil Mossey, Google, Google storage, storage saver, storage full, storage is full, how to, fix, clear, empty, recover, delete, increase, for free, free, phone, full, Google Drive, Google Photos, photos, videos, space, free up, avoid paying, run out, get back, Gmail, out of storage, Google one, plan, buy storage, memory, remove, backup, sync, synch, email, files, storage full problem, problem, how to clear, how to delete, Google photos app, back up, stop backup

Id: R_f1em_7mjU

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2022