Ever since Google took away free unlimited storage onGoogle Photos, I knew I’d have to figure out a way to keep my ever-growing photo library slim and lean. Google’s existing tools are a passable point to get started, but they lack important context. That’s why I’m very excited to get my hands onGoogle Photos’ new photo stacks, which are supposed to group similar photos taken at roughly the same time in a stack much likeTop Shotdoes. While this is primarily intended to make it easier to scroll through your library, it will also make it much easier to pick a single great shot and discard the rest.
Google Photos and its bait and switch strategy
To preface this, Google Photos used to offer a deal that was too good to be true. Up until June 2021, you could upload as many images and videos as you wanted to. Fair, this was limited to compressed images (now called storage saver) on most phones, but some Pixel handsets got unlimited storage for full-resolution images. Many other companies couldn’t compete with this offer just based on the server cost, and people uploading millions of photos to the service only made it better at its core capabilities.
Google Photos quickly became better and better at recognizing recurring faces of friends and family. Object recognition was also long unmatched, with Photos allowing you to search for things, animals, places, anything you could think of. A lot of competitors gave up in the process, leaving Photos as pretty much the only viable option on Android if you want a smart gallery.
At some point, Google likely decided that it acquired enough data to train its image recognition algorithms and started thinking about actually paying the bills to keep the servers running. The company announced its switch to a paid model, with newly uploaded photos counting against your Google storage quota. To ease the transition, Google offered some customers a longer grace period. The company also introduced a number of tools to help you clean your Photos storage and an estimate of how long your current tier is going to last you when you keep uploading images the way you do.
The existing storage saving options don’t cut it for me
To me, those tools always seemed a little half-baked and not perfectly useful. Within theGoogle Photos storage managementscreen, there are three options for you to choose from to review and delete content: one section lists large photos and videos, sorted from big to small, another section shows blurry photos, and one more gives you an overview of all your screenshots (or images that look like screenshots).
It’s true that these three categories are the most likely culprits clogging up unnecessary storage, but there is more to the story. A five-minute video is going to take up a lot more storage than an image, but videos deliver so much more context than an image could ever provide, allowing you to relieve a situation much more closely. That way, simply putting the biggest videos at the beginning of the list, suggesting to delete those first, is misleading. There is also no way to remove content from those sections or filter for specific image formats or dates, no matter which section you’re looking at.
Given all that, the three sections become mostly useless when you want to clean up your storage on a regular basis. You will be confronted with the same images and videos that you’ve decided to keep over and over again, making you question that decision.
These clearly aren’t even screenshots in that last image
At the same time, all three sections are lacking context altogether. This is particularly problematic for blurred images. It’s possible that some of these blurred images are the only photos you have of a given moment, so even if they’re blurry, they’re still so much better to have than not having them at all.
All these factors combined just culminate in a lot of decision fatigue. This makes you more likely to just postpone your library cleanup or give up on it altogether, opting to buy more storage instead.
Photo stacks make my library cleaner and help spot duplicates
For me, the new photo stacks might finally be a game changer for clearing out storage, even if they may not originally be meant for this. Once they roll out to you, similar images will be stacked on top of each other, with only the best shot displayed as a cover image. The rest of the photos are still accessible when you view the best shot in full screen via a carousel at the bottom, though. In your library, these stacks are made visually distinct from regular photos with an icon in the top right corner and a number attached.
I’m looking forward to Google helping clean up these duplicates
This feature is primarily meant to make it easier to browse your library. Rather than seeing a lot of repetitive shots of the same thing, you may more easily sift through hundreds of different events in your timeline. However, if you’re on a quest to free up some storage, you can use this same feature to clean up your library. With it, Google already does all the heavy lifting for you, giving you an easy way to detect all bursts of similar photos you have. You can then just visit each stack, review which of the images in it is truly worth keeping, and straight-up delete the rest.
Using photo stacks to clean up your library also has the advantage that you may see the context of your images. As mentioned, the existing cleanup tools just show you suggested photos in isolation, making you second-guess if you can really delete them or if you should keep them for the sake of havinganypicture of whatever it is you photographed. With photo stacks, you can clearly see which other images of the day you have.
We will hopefully see more smart ways to help cut down on storage
Google Photos is now more than two years into paid storage, and we can only hope that Google will bring more features like this to the table. Photo stacks will likely help me cut down on a lot of excess already, but I think Google could take it further.
For one, the existing cleanup tools could get smarter. Google could allow us to mark images and videos we’d like to keep even if they’re blurry, big, or look like screenshots.
Mockup of a Google Photos cleanup mode with labels for large files, blurry images, and “screenshots”
For another, Google could add a cleanup view to the library itself, giving you information about size and perceived blurriness right in the library. This would make it possible to understand what these images look like in context, and which you can delete without worrying about losing key information.
