How to properly delete Photos and Videos from Google Photos

Google Photos is a great tool for keeping your memories safe, but it can be a little confusing when you want to remove something. Depending on how you use the app, deleting a picture might remove it from just one place or everywhere at once. To help clear things up, Google recently shared a guide on how deletion works across your phone and the cloud.

If you use the Google Photos app on your phone with the backup feature turned off, deleting a photo is simple. It only removes the file from your phone’s storage. Most modern phones have a trash bin, so the photo might stay there for a short time before it is gone forever, but it won’t affect anything in the cloud because nothing was backed up.

The situation changes if your backup feature is turned on. When you tap the delete button in the app, Google removes the photo from your phone, your online account, and any other devices that are synced. This is the quickest way to get rid of a photo completely. When you do this, the photo moves to a trash folder in the cloud for 60 days before it is permanently deleted. If you only want to save space on your phone but keep the photo in the cloud, you should use the “Delete from device” option instead of the main delete button.

Using the Google Photos website on a computer works a bit differently. If you delete a photo from the website, it only removes the version stored in the cloud. The original file will stay on your phone. You will still see the photo in your phone’s app because the app shows what is stored locally on your device. To get rid of it entirely, you would need to delete it from your phone separately.

If you are looking to clear out a lot of storage at once, the “Free up space” tool is a great option. It automatically removes photos from your phone that have already been safely backed up to the cloud. By understanding these different steps, you can manage your storage better and make sure you don’t accidentally lose a memory you wanted to keep.