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Across the years/decade as I've uploaded photos to GPhotos, some with storage offers, some without, I have photos and videos that some count towards the storage quota and most don't.

How do I find out which ones count towards my storage quota? I would like to batch download and delete them from library (I'll store them elsewhere) and recover my Google Account Storage Quota.

The Photos Web/Mobile UI has recently begun showing if photos count towards quota:

Example of counting against quota: Example of not counting against quota:
Example of counting against quota Example of counting against quota

Since it's being shown in the Web UI, I'm hoping there's a batch/programmatic way to identify/list/delete these media items.

Things I've looked through till now:

  1. Google One Storage Management Page: https://one.google.com/storage/management

  2. Google Drive File Quota management (doesn't cover Google Photos anymore): https://drive.google.com/drive/quota

  3. Google Photos Web Quota management: https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement

  4. Google Photos API documentation: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/overview

  5. (3p) GPhotos Uploader CLI (uses above API) documentation: https://gphotosuploader.github.io/gphotos-uploader-cli/#/configuration?id=including-and-excluding-files

  6. (3p) rclone Google Photos integration: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

  7. Previous SE questions like: How do I know if a video is consuming space on Google Photos? which don't focus on a batch solution and are out of date from Google's recent product developments (upto EOY 2022)

  8. Deprecated Google Picasa's Album Archive View: https://get.google.com/albumarchive/ (deprecated as of July 19, 2023)

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    Did you ever figure this out? Here is another similar question: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/163420/…
    – Daniel
    Commented Apr 3, 2023 at 11:38
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    @daniel I have not found an answer yet. This might require Python+Selenium hacking to automate it though going over 400k+ media items from my Library seems like it'll trigger all sorts of throttling behavior from Google.
    – MyPreciousss
    Commented Apr 6, 2023 at 22:01
  • Build your own throttling into your script so you don't trigger google's throttling? I mean, if it is happening online, in the cloud, is there really a rush to get it done tomorrow, especially when we have already gone this long waiting for a solution? I personally don't mind if it takes one month, or even two or three months, to slowly crawl all my media - as long as it gets done in the end.
    – Daniel
    Commented Sep 12, 2023 at 21:48

1 Answer 1

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After over a year of searching and also trying my own scripts, I've found a solution!

Screenshot of Google Photos Toolkit showing it processing a photo library of all 'space consuming' media items and putting them into an album successfully. Took it 7 minutes according to the screenshot, which is of Firefox on MacOS. Turns out it was just 450 small sized items in my case, and after looking through the album it's essentially all the 'auto-awesome' creations like Collages, Video GIFs, Cinematic Moments, etc.

xob0t's excellent Google Photos Toolkit uses the undocumented Google Photos Web API to traverse through the library, and filter for this crucial bit.

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  • thats is a game changer! Thanks a lot, already saved 7 GB on my drive!
    – Artiom
    Commented Aug 30 at 7:55

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