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Ask HN: How to delete all Google photos so that I don't lose access to Gmail?
A while ago I purchased storage from Google for photo backups for something like $2.99 a year. Sometime thereafter they merged all of my Google services so that my Gmail is now on the Photos storage plan.
Sometime later the price for storage has gone up to $39.99 a year, so I decided to start backing up my photos to a NAS, and I downloaded everything locally and stopped using Google photos.
This week I received an email that if I don't renew my storage subscription then I will lose access to Gmail. Unfortunately I've been using Gmail for my primary email for almost 20 years so I'll be in a world of pain if I'm suddenly shut off.
I think if I delete my photos, then I will no longer be over the free tier limit, but I have thousands of photos and there doesn't seem to be a clear way to just delete them except for manually clicking each one and pressing delete.
The storage account is supposed to come with email support, but I have not got a reply on what to do.
Does anybody know of an app or script or anything I can use to delete these photos?
- Glench 3y agoI just made an extension that does it! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/delete-all-google-photos/bebhhjmapjadpdkkhbkpnpbjhkhndofl?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/delete-all-google-p...
- seeknotfind 3y agoSort by size in Google photos? Backup all of them, delete all of them, review others locally however you want, reupload?
- yuppie_scum 3y agoYou can select like 500 at a time or something and hit delete. I did this recently. You can have this done in 20-30 minutes if you set your mind to it.
- arealaccount 3y agoUltimately I did this, it took 55 minutes. Zooming way out in the browser helped.
- Orangeair 3y agoThis page will show you your storage quota usage by service, and it gives you some tools to clean things up: https://drive.google.com/settings/storage https://drive.google.com/settings/storage
- fouc 3y agoseems like you can go into per-app pages from here as well
- jbverschoor 3y agoMaybe send a postcard to someone at Google, just like 20 years ago :-D
- jbverschoor 3y agoAh come on with the down votes.. That's how I got my invite at least
- jbverschoor 3y agoMake a search query... select pages. Or use an imap client and use that to delete them.. (make sure you fix your settings for Archive/Delete... "All Mail" on IMAP is the worst invention ever) It's probably more reliable to create a new folder/label first.. And then delete them after you've done the sorting.
- mkasberg 3y agoShift-click (on the last photo) to select bulk photos works in the web interface. Not sure you can do all at once but you can probably do hundreds at once.
- DrNosferatu 3y ago“Google One” - yes, it’s a Google Product - has a pretty good tool to manage your storage space.
- dadjoker 3y agoI have the same problem, and they have a tool for exporting all of them that I used called Google Takeout.
- 9991 3y agoThe best time to stop using gmail is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. Get your own domain so email hosters can’t hold you hostage over it.
- bb88 3y agoRunning your own email server was fun maybe back in 2004. It is no longer fun today.
- secstate 3y agoI appreciate it's not for everyone, but the mailinabox.email script collections makes it surprisingly painless. The world needs more people to put some effort into things, otherwise we'll get the future we tried for, and that's looking increasingly like a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie.
- miloignis 3y agoOwning a domain does not mean you have to run your own email server - I'm a happy FastMail customer with my own domain pointed at FastMail. If FastMail ever stops making me happy, I'll switch, and I'll keep my email address because the domain is mine.
- 9991 3y agoWhile true, this is not relevant to my admonition.
- gigel82 3y agoI've recently deleted my Google Photos as well and found the interface extremely unintuitive. Turns out you can multi-select with Shift, though there are no UX affordances for that. FWIW, I've never had an Android phone but apparently long ago (9+ years) I've had some photos up on a product called Picasa. When the product died, I just assumed the photos will be deleted but instead they got transferred into this Google Photos thing. Only found out when I did a "request my data" for my gmail and got back like 40Gbs of archives.
- billybuckwheat 3y agoTry https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/?
- ivanstegic 3y agoMaybe just pay the $40 and forget about it until next year.
- asdz 3y agoOn desktop, you can use the 'Shift' key and select all the photos. You can do that and delete all at once. For download, the takeout is the best way.