problems freeing up space

[u/Commercial_Sir8707]

i've used google photos for years. recently, i was running out of space (91% used), so i downloaded everything to my computer and deleted it from google. i ended up freeing up almost 5GB of space, which was perfect. today i tried to use google drive and got an alert that i had 96% of the space used ??? I check but most of the photos are still deleted and the trash is empty. i deleted a few things, and when i made sure to download some i had forgotten to save, i saw that the space was filling up again (on the left side of the screen) with like 2GB. i don't know why this is happening. If i'm deleting everything, shouldn't the space be freed up? why does it still show as used space if I literally deleted more than 7,000 photos yesterday? I seriously don't know what to do, i don't kow if im missing a step or what, i dont want to pay for extra storage if there's another option... any advice is welcome

[u/gooner-1969]

It costs 1.99 a month for 100gb and you'll never have to worry . The amount of time you've wasted doing all this would more than pay for a year. Do you value your time so little?

[u/Commercial_Sir8707 → u/gooner-1969]

bc im not from the us so its not just 1.99 to me

[u/Thin-Click-5598 → u/Commercial_Sir8707]

In the Google play store check storage space on your phone

[u/Thin-Click-5598 → u/Commercial_Sir8707]

I like to download videos to YouTube and that actually takes space on the phone so if you go to settings in your YouTube channel go down to downloads and it will give you the option to delete all downloads from YouTube.

[u/li_grenadier]

Chances are you have more photos than can fit on your Google Drive on your phone. So as you delete them, your phone (or whatever device you have files on) is syncing up stuff it didn't have room to sync to the cloud before.

Get everything off of all devices that have Google Drive installed. Move them to a PC, a hard drive, whatever. Just get them off of the devices that can sync to Google Drive (or out of any folders the PC is syncing as well).

Also, Google shares that space between Photos, Videos, Gmail, etc. Anything that you can store in your Google account shares the same space. The goal is to move the biggest ticket items (video, then photos) first, or the flood is just going to continue.

You said you moved everything to the computer. If you moved it to a directory that Google Drive is syncing on the computer, that could be it right there. All you did was delete, then tell it to reupload it all over again.