I have lots of picture files in my Google Drive accounts for work. I don't understand why those pictures in Google Drive take up "storage", whereas pictures in Google Photos (in high quality) don't. So how can store all those pics in the corresponding Google Photos, and only link them into my Drive subfolders where necessary so they don't take up storage space.
Google-drive – How to place Google Drive pictures in Google Photos accounts and link to them
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Related Solutions
From How Google Drive works with Google Photos - Drive Help
You can view and manage your photos and videos in both Google Photos and Google Drive. You can also create a Google Photos folder in your "My Drive," to organize your photos and videos into folders. Photos and videos that you can see in both Google Photos and Drive only count once in your Google storage space.
View your Google Photos library in Google Drive
Your Google Photos library includes everything that's been backed up or uploaded using Google+ Photos or Google Photos.
In Google Drive, you can move your photos and videos from your Google Photos library into folders. Note that the folder names and organization you create in Google Drive will not be reflected in Google Photos.
Computer
- Go to drive.google.com.
- Click Google Photos on the left.
Take action on your photos & videos in Drive
From the "Google Photos" section in Drive, you can take a number of different actions on the items that appear.
Computer
- Go to drive.google.com.
- Click Google Photos on the left.
- Place your cursor over a photo to:
- Download
: Download the photo to your device
- Save to Drive
: Save a copy of the photo to My Drive. This allows you to organize the photo, and other files, the way you want.
- Other actions
: Choose from a number of options:
- Open with another application
- Share
- Star as important
- Rename
- Make a copy
- Remove from Drive and Google Photos
Although Google Photos is taking up your storage, the photos probably show up under Google Drive in a special subfolder called Google Photos.
- Go to drive.google.com, click on Google Photos, and click on individual photos, you can open the information pane on the right and it will show "storage used". If it was uploaded as high quality, it will show 0 bytes for the storage used. This, of course, is not a very convenient way to determine and fix your issue for many files. See below.
- Videos also abide by this rule apparently: see this.
In November 2015 Google offered a way to convert already-uploaded Original Quality photos to High Quality to recover storage space. Click "Recover Storage" at this link.
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Best Answer
The photos in "High quality" in Google Photos are actually compressed. Google offers you free storage for this setting because they're encouraging people to back up all their photos to Google Photos, without undesirably running out of storage space later on.
If you want your photos to not take up space, with this setting, you will have to import your photos from Google Drive into Google Photos. First, make sure that the upload size is set to "High quality (free unlimited storage)" in the Google Photos settigs. Then, click "Upload" on the top-right of photos.google.com, then select from "Google Drive", and select all the photos in a folder you want to import. Once you have imported the photos to Google Photos, you can choose to delete them in Google Drive, so that they don't take up storage space there.