How much of your Google storage is actually Photos?

Google gives you one 15 GB bar shared by Drive, Gmail and Photos — and never tells you how it splits. PhotoBalance splits it, then shows you what's inside Photos: the videos, the years, the albums, the screenshots, the duplicates. It runs entirely inside your browser tab.

Open PhotoBalance

No account needed for the breakdown. No install. No payment. Nothing uploaded, ever.

Why this needed building

Photos is the biggest slice of most people's 15 GB, and the only one no app can look inside. On 31 March 2025 Google switched off the Photos API scopes that let applications list a library. Every "Google Photos cleaner" that worked by scanning your library stopped working that day, and nothing can replace it — the remaining scopes only see photos the app itself uploaded.

So PhotoBalance doesn't scan. It gets its numbers from the two places Google left open, and it's honest about which is which.

How it works

1. The split — one click, five seconds. Sign in and PhotoBalance makes a single call to read your storage total. Drive's share is known exactly, so everything else is Photos + Gmail. Tell it your Gmail figure and Photos falls out to the byte. The scope it asks for is drive.file — the narrowest one Google offers. It grants access only to files an app creates or you explicitly open with it, and PhotoBalance does neither, so the token can't read a single file of yours.
2. The breakdown — no sign-in at all. Export your library with Google Takeout and drop the .zip onto the page. A ZIP file carries an index of everything inside it, so PhotoBalance reads that — a few hundred kilobytes — and gets every filename and byte size without decompressing, uploading or opening anything. A 50 GB export is analysed in about a second, offline.
3. You clean up in Google Photos by following the links PhotoBalance shows you.

What you get

• The split — Drive vs Photos vs Gmail, from Google's own figures, with a straight verdict on whether Photos is even your problem.
• Storage Saver estimate — the single biggest win in Photos, because it re-compresses your library in place and deletes nothing.
• Videos — one 4K clip outweighs hundreds of photos. This is where the gigabytes really are, and it's almost never where people look first.
• By year and by album — which era of your library is expensive.
• Duplicates — identical content filed under a different name. (Copies that Takeout makes for each album are excluded: they're one photo on Google's disk, and reporting them as reclaimable would be a lie.)
• Cleanup packs — screenshots, chat-app media, RAW files, big old videos: one-tap targets with a live size estimate.

PhotoBalance never deletes, moves or modifies anything. It has no write access and, during the Takeout breakdown, no connection at all.

What data it accesses

One scope, drive.file, used for exactly one call: reading your storage quota. It is Google's non-sensitive tier — it cannot list, read or touch your files, your mail or your photos. Your Takeout archive is never transmitted anywhere; it is read from your own disk by your own browser.

The index PhotoBalance builds is stored on your device and you can wipe it from Settings at any time. See the Privacy Policy.

The other two

Photos, Drive and Gmail share one quota, so the three tools complete each other. Whichever one is your problem, there's a breakdown for it: