Where did your Google Drive storage go? 5 hidden space-hogs you can delete now

1. Empty your spam and promotions folders first

Before you delete a single file from Drive, start with your inbox. Spam, Promotions, Social — those folders count toward your storage allowance and most people never think to clear them out.

The fix takes about two minutes. Head into your Spam folder in Gmail, tick the box in the top left corner and "Delete Forever." Next, work through your Promotions and Social folders the same way, selecting all and deleting in bulk.

It can be a bit tedious, but for most people this one step alone makes a noticeable dent.

2. Sort your Drive by file size

Most people try to free up storage by picking through files one at a time, which is a slow and demoralizing way to spend an afternoon. There's a much smarter approach: sort everything by size and delete from the top down.

In Google Drive on desktop, click Storage in the left-hand menu and your files will automatically appear in order from largest to smallest. What you'll often find is that a handful of large video files, old presentations, or forgotten downloads are responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of your used storage.

Deleting two or three of those can do more for your available space than clearing out fifty small documents. Just remember to empty your Trash afterwards — files sitting in there still count against your allowance until they're gone for good.

3. Go through Google Photos

Photos and videos share the same 15GB pot as everything else in your Google account, and for most people they're the single biggest drain on it. A few years of smartphone photos add up fast, and videos are especially punishing — even a short clip can be several hundred megabytes.

Unlike Drive, Google Photos doesn't let you sort by file size, so you'll need to do a bit of manual work here. Start with videos, since they're almost always the biggest space hogs, then look for duplicate shots, burst photos, and screenshots you kept for no particular reason.

Select, delete, and empty the Photos Trash to make sure it counts. One thing worth knowing if you're an iPhone user: if you have Backup and Sync enabled, deleting a photo from Google Photos will remove the local copy from your device too — so make sure you're happy to let it go before you tap delete.

4. Download what you can't delete, then clear out

Not all storage hogs are files worth deleting. Downloading from Drive is straightforward: select the files you want, hit the three-dot menu in the top right corner and click Download.

Move everything onto an external hard drive or your computer's local storage, delete the originals from Drive, empty the Trash, and the storage counter updates almost immediately. Everything's still there, it's just no longer eating into your allowance.

5. Check the storage breakdown page

Honestly this one should probably be step one, but it works better as a habit to clear out what you can from your storage first. Google has a storage management page at one.google.com/storage that shows you exactly how your 15GB is being used across Drive, Gmail and Photos in one place.

It flags large files, dormant items, and anything worth a second look, which means you can go into your clean-up with a clear picture of where the problem actually is rather than guessing.

Most people never look at this page, which is exactly why their storage fills up faster than it should. Bookmark it, check it every few months, and you'll never end up staring at a "storage full" notification wondering where it all went again.