Schools & teams
School Google Drive storage full? Shrink the photos, keep every one
The storage limit is real and it is not going away. But the thing filling most school drives is not documents — it is years of full-size phone photos from trips, events and classrooms. Those can get dramatically smaller without anyone losing a picture.
Where the limit actually comes from
Google Workspace for Education gives each institution a shared pool of 100 TB. Few schools exhaust the whole pool. What people run into are the limits admins set to share it fairly: a cap per teacher or student, and a cap per shared drive. Google’s own admin guide uses 100 GB per shared drive as its default example.
When a person or a shared drive goes over, nothing is deleted — but new uploads stop. That is usually the moment someone asks IT which folders can be removed.
Deleting is the slow, painful option
Clean up by deleting
- Someone has to decide what is safe to remove
- Teachers argue for their folders, rightly
- Old event photos go first — and are gone for good
- The drive fills up again next term
Shrink the photos in place
- Pick a folder of images in Google Drive
- Choose a size suited to screens and printing
- Smaller versions are written back where they were
- Every photo is kept; most of the space comes back
How much space comes back
A modern phone photo is typically 3–8 MB, and high-resolution shots can be much larger. Resized to a sensible 2,000 pixels and saved as JPEG, the same picture is usually a few hundred kilobytes and looks identical on a projector or a printed newsletter. In our measured run a 43.5 MB HEIC came down to 412 KB — see how much images actually compress for every file, including what was lost.
What IT usually wants to know
PixelCinch only gets access to the files a person chooses in the Google file picker — not their whole Drive, and nothing else in your domain. The compression happens in the browser, so school images never pass through a PixelCinch server. It works in shared drives, including for staff who only have view access: their results are saved to their own Drive instead of failing. Full details are in the privacy policy.
Recorded lessons and event videos
Recorded lessons, assemblies and sports days are often the largest files on a school domain. PixelCinch compresses videos as well as photos — in the teacher’s browser, nothing uploaded to us — usually to about a quarter of the size. Compress videos in Google Drive.
Questions
Why does our school suddenly have a storage limit?
Google Workspace for Education used to be unlimited. Since July 2022 every institution shares a pooled baseline of 100 TB, and admins divide that pool by setting limits for users and shared drives. The pool rarely runs out; the per-person and per-drive caps are what people actually hit.
What happens when a teacher or a shared drive goes over the limit?
Nothing is deleted, but new files cannot be uploaded to Google Drive until usage is back under the cap. For a class shared drive that usually means the next batch of photos simply fails to upload.
Do we have to delete photos to get back under the cap?
No. Phone photos are typically several megabytes each and are almost never viewed at that size. Compressing them in place keeps every photo and recovers most of the space. In a measured run, twelve real files went from 81.3 MB to 1.5 MB.
Does this need admin approval or broad access to our Drive?
PixelCinch asks only for access to the files a person picks, nothing else in the domain. The images are compressed inside the browser; they are never uploaded to a PixelCinch server. Your admin can still choose to restrict third-party apps — that control stays with them. Admins can also install it for the whole domain, or for chosen groups, from the Google Admin console, so staff do not each have to add it.
Can a teacher with view-only access to a shared drive use it?
Yes. Images they cannot edit are still compressed, and the smaller copies are saved to their own Drive instead of the run failing halfway. Replacing the originals needs edit access, as it should.
How does pricing work for a whole school?
Everyone gets 50 images a month free, no card. The Team plan is $49 a month on one invoice and covers everyone on your email domain — no seats to count or manage. If your district needs a formal quote, annual billing or vendor forms, email help@pixelcinch.com and we will prepare them.
Related: compress images in a shared drive · HEIC to JPG in Google Drive · what actually frees up Drive storage · school turned off Google Photos?