Teams on Google Workspace
Google Workspace storage full? Check the photos before you upgrade
Business Starter includes 30 GB per user. For a team that shares site photos, listing photos or product shots in Drive, that disappears fast — and the usual fix is paying for a bigger edition. Often the cheaper fix is making the photos smaller.
How the limit works
Storage in most Workspace editions is pooled: each license adds to one company-wide total, shared by Drive, Gmail and shared drives. Business Starter adds 30 GB per user; Frontline adds 5 GB. A person who goes over a limit set for them can no longer upload to Drive. If the whole company goes over its total by 25%, or stays over for two weeks, uploads stop for everyone.
Who hits it first
Teams that take photos for work: real estate agents uploading every listing, construction and inspection crews documenting sites, shops shooting products, agencies collecting client assets. A phone photo is typically 3–8 MB. Five hundred of them is several gigabytes — per project.
Upgrade the edition
- Pay more for every seat, every month
- The photos stay just as large
- The new limit fills up the same way, only later
Shrink the photos in place
- Pick the photo folders in Google Drive
- Resize to a sensible size, compress
- Smaller versions are written back to the same folders
- One Team plan covers your whole email domain
What it saves
In a measured run, twelve real photos went from 81.3 MB to 1.5 MB, and a 43.5 MB iPhone HEIC came down to 412 KB. See every file and what changed. Images are processed in your browser — they never pass through a PixelCinch server — and the app only gets access to the files each person picks.
Check the videos first
In shared drives full of site visits, events or training recordings, videos are usually the heaviest files. PixelCinch compresses those too, in the browser, to about a quarter of their size — how it works for video.
Questions
How much storage does Business Starter include?
30 GB per user, pooled across the organization. Pooled means one person can use more than 30 GB as long as the company total stays under the limit — unless your admin sets per-user limits. Frontline editions get 5 GB per user.
What happens when we go over?
A person over their own limit stops being able to upload to Drive straight away. If the whole organization goes over its total by 25%, or stays over for 14 days, uploads to Drive stop for everyone until usage comes back down.
Should we just upgrade to Business Standard?
If you genuinely need 2 TB per person, yes. But if the space is mostly full-size phone photos that nobody views at camera resolution, shrinking them usually gets you back under the limit for a fraction of the cost of upgrading every seat.
Will compressed photos still be good enough for listings and reports?
At around 2,000 pixels on the long edge, photos look the same on screens, in PDFs and on listing sites, and are usually a few hundred kilobytes instead of several megabytes.
Does it work with shared drives?
Yes. Shared drives count toward the same pool, and PixelCinch works in them exactly like in My Drive — including for people who only have view access, whose results are saved to their own Drive instead of failing.
Related: compress images in a shared drive · what actually frees up Drive storage · schools: storage full