TL;DR: below, a solution on how to mass delete your backup photos from Google Plus (and why would you want to do that)?
I recently got into the problem of having too much data in my Google Drive. You know the situation – you add some things in your Google account, and, at some point, you have so much data in there that you are required to pay for a premium account. I wouldn’t generally mind to do so, but I prefer to pay when I choose to, not when I’m forced to.
The 2 USD / month for 100 GB / year is a tempting one, but there are alternatives which are free, and after one year of usage, it’s generally hard to switch.
To understand my problem, see the below graph, which shows my current space usage on Gmail:
I used to have around 2-3 GB more in my Gmail and 5 GB more on Google Drive.
For Gmail, it was simple. Using some search parameters, I just searched for Google Calendar appointment emails, newsletters, and emails with attachments sent within some timeframe. I then mass deleted emails. Simple.
For Google Photos, the main issue was that I have in there a few hundred albums and most of them should have photos stored at the „right” image size, which is, according to Google, 2048 x 2048 pixels.
So, I tested, randomly, some folders in there, and couldn’t find the albums which, supposedly, had images with bigger resolution than these.
Then, I’ve found a way to sync Google Photos with Google Drive. And I started syncing. It took a while to download the files, considering there were tenths of thousands. After a while, I did a search on them, and I found that there were some videos (surprise, surprise, I didn’t want these in my Google Photos), and some large images (surprising, considering I tend to always check the option, in Google Picasa, to have images which are less than 2048 x 2048 when uploaded).
I started deleting videos (example search »), but, still, there were a few gigabytes of data to remove. So, I looked, to find that there were images larger than 2048 x 2048. After some digging (going through files like this »), I found that most of the images were, in fact, backup photos from my Android phone.
I found the folder with the problems », but I couldn’t mass delete albums in there.
After some digging », I finally found out that this is the link I should have visited right from the start:
https://plus.google.com/photos/+YOURUSERNAME/albums/camerasync
All this trouble just for finding a URL. In there, all the photos, probably all the videos, too, had I not deleted them. Much simpler, now to delete.
Still, in my Picasa album » there were some empty folders, but I can safely ignore that folder.
Mission accomplished. :)
Anyhow, using this list », I found out a better alternative to Google Drive, which i currently use.
So, at the end of the day:
- Less than 15 GB of files in Google account.
- A solution for backing up files better than Google Drive, for my needs, at least.