Google Storage Hogs: Where Your Biggest Files Hide

When you're running low on Google storage space, it's tempting to start deleting photos from your gallery. But this approach rarely works because the biggest files often hide in other parts of your account.

Google gives every free account a shared 15GB pool that splits across Gmail, Drive, and Photos. To see how much space you're using, you need to head to Google One Storage Manager, a page that's not mentioned in storage warnings. Here, you can view your full storage allowance in one place, split cleanly between different services.

The dashboard also organizes the largest files across your entire account into a single cleanup list. This is something individual mobile apps never do. Regular smartphone photos weigh only 3 to 5 MB, but large email attachments and old threads can add up to multiple gigabytes of space.