Tired of facing no more free space warning on your Google account? How about recovering all the space used by your Google Photos without deleting any? That's precisely what you can do now thanks to Google's new Recover Storage option.
When you use Google Photos you're give two choices; you can keep all your photos and videos in original format but using up your available cloud storage space; or you can choose the "high quality" option that slightly compresses your photos and videos (most of the time with little to no perceptible quality loss) that allows you to store an unlimited amount of photos.
The problem was, if you started using it by choosing "original photos" you might now have several gigabytes of used space - and no easy way to switch to the unlimited "high quality" mode. Sure, you can switch at any time, but that won't clear up the gigabytes of photos you have already there. To do so, you'd have to redownload everything, delete every photo, and reupload once again - not something anyone would be inclined to do.
That's precisely what Google has now fixed with this new "Recover Storage" option. With it, you can simple reclaim all the space used by your original photos and videos, by converting them to "high quality". All it takes is a single click (and confirmation you really want to do it), and then it's just a mater of waiting a couple of hours, depending on how many photos and videos you have.
When it's done, you should be able to head to your storage management and see your photos now use 0GB of Google space.
Finally, that was a function a lot of people were looking for, thanks for letting me know!
ReplyDeleteYes, but there was no point in searching for it until now... as it simply didn't exist before. :)
Delete