Visual way to clean your Google Drive (Windows only)

I love having all my photos and videos backed up on my Google Drive. But, Google, at some point, started charging a monthly fees. Well that sucks! Everyone seems to like the model of being a leech sucking away a chunk of my monthly paycheck. The only option I have is to clean my stuff up.

There are a ton of problems when trying to use the tools Google provides to identify low hanging fruits. While Google does provide a way to sort files in descending order of size and clean them up, it doesn’t display data used at a folder level. It also somehow doesn’t seem to show what’s in my Google Photos folder.

‘Nuff said! You don’t need to have to read a 6 mins medium post to clean up a google drive. Hell, I don’t think I should take 6 mins to write an article about cleaning up a Google drive! So let’s dive in…

TL;DR: I map my Google Drive as a folder on my PC and use WinDirStat to visually inspect and clean it up!

How to mount Google Drive on my PC?

Step 1: Download and install the Google Drive from Google’s official website here.

Step 2: Open the app and log on to your account.

Step 3: Google Drive is mapped as the G: Drive on your PC by default!

Using WinDirStat to visualize the contents

WinDirStat is a tool which can visualize the contents of your drive. It can show which individual files occupy the most size, it also groups all the files within a folder near each other with a separate color. This way, even if individual files are small, you can select an entire directory which ends up taking a lot of space.

You can install WinDirStat here.

Next, open WinDirStat and choose G: Drive and let it run. It might take some time based on the size of your drive.

And voila, you can learn a lot about your storage, clean it up and spend that subscription fees on more meaningful stuff like dating apps… right?