Google Photos does a lot of things right, which is just as well since many of us sleepwalked into using it and are now somewhat reliant on it. But the quality of phone cameras in 2026 means the standard 15GB of free storage — less if you don’t want to share your phone number — feels like almost nothing, and at some point, you might decide you’d quite like some of that space back. Google does offer tools to help you reclaim those gigabytes, but we recently asked readers whether the whole process should be easier.
My colleague Megan Ellis recently shared a handful of tips and tricks for freeing up Google Photos storage after doing some serious housekeeping on her own library. With more than 47,000 backed-up items, she managed to claw back around 23GB by using Google’s existing cleanup tools and a few more hands-on methods. The experience also exposed some obvious limitations, especially the lack of a straightforward duplicate-photo finder, so we asked readers whether Google needs to make the job easier via a poll in her article.
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