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I am sure that you all know that Google offers the free backup of photos through their Google Photos App. I've since found out that the free backup, as Google advertises, with reduced photo quality only reduces quality for photos that are greater than 16MP - https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en

My phone is my main source of backup and it shoots at 12MP so it should be full quality backup as far as I understand.

The other thing is that Google Photos are now integrated into Google Drive. At the root of my Google Drive I have a folder called Google Photos, which organized all my backed up photos by year and month (this is awesome!).

My question comes in here. Is there a way that I can tell the size on disk of my Google Photos folder? Basically I am going to start a sync to a computer of my Google Drive but I don't want to sync all of those Photos, it'll take forever and potentially a huge amount of disk space and bandwidth.

To make matters worse I am using a third party application, called grive, that will do the sync to my Ubuntu laptop. I am not sure if the Windows and Mac official Google Drive sync apps have more options but this one doesn't have the option to exclude a folder.

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You should be able to go to:

https://www.google.com/settings/storage?hl=en

Then hover over the pie chart and it will bring up a window showing your detailed usage. Google Photos should be in the list, and that should be your total amount used by your photo storage in that folder.

enter image description here

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  • This is really useful. Unfortunately it does not show that amount of storage space that my backed up photos are using that are apart of the "Free Storage" from Google. I have tons of photos backed up (like 3 years worth) and it is only showing me 90MB
    – tyelford
    Commented Mar 20, 2016 at 9:33
  • You can use Google Takeout to have a big zip file of all your photos generated. This takes some time and is bigger than the value displayed in the pie chart (8 GB pie chart in my case, 40 GB download size). Then you can decide whether you will download it.
    – Michael S.
    Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 13:08

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