Schools & teams
Your school turned off Google Photos. Now Drive is filling up.
A growing number of schools and universities have disabled Google Photos on school accounts and asked people to keep the photos they need in Google Drive instead. That works — until the storage cap arrives, because Drive keeps every photo at full size.
What usually happens
IT announces a date. Before it, people export their library with Google Takeout, sort out what is personal, and upload the school-related photos into Drive or a shared drive. After it, Google Photos stops working for the school account.
The catch: Drive does not compress anything. A folder of phone photos uploaded to Drive counts at its full weight against the same per-person or per-shared-drive limit that prompted the change in the first place.
Move first, then shrink
1. Move what belongs to school
- Export your library with Google Takeout before the deadline
- Keep personal photos in a personal account
- Upload class, event and work photos to Drive or a shared drive
- Check your storage: drive.google.com/settings/storage
2. Shrink them in Drive
- Open PixelCinch and pick the uploaded folder
- Choose a size suited to screens and printing
- Smaller versions are written back to the same folder
- Every photo stays; most of the space comes back
How much smaller
Phone photos are typically 3–8 MB. Resized to around 2,000 pixels — plenty for slides, a projector or a printed newsletter — they are usually a few hundred kilobytes. In our measured run, twelve real files went from 81.3 MB to 1.5 MB, and a 43.5 MB iPhone HEIC came down to 412 KB. The full results show every file.
For IT teams writing the announcement
If your guidance tells people to move photos into Drive, it helps to mention that they can be shrunk there. PixelCinch only gets access to the files a person picks, processes them in the browser, and works in shared drives — including for staff with view-only access, whose results are saved to their own Drive. One Team plan covers your whole email domain. More detail for admins: school Drive storage full.
Questions
Why are schools turning off Google Photos?
Google Workspace for Education no longer has unlimited storage. Schools share a fixed pool and set caps per person. Google Photos libraries are hard for IT to manage and often hold personal pictures, so several institutions have switched the app off for school accounts.
Where should my photos go?
Personal photos belong in a personal account — most school IT pages say so. Photos you need for school or work (events, classes, research, marketing) usually go to Google Drive or a shared drive, which is what IT teams typically recommend.
Will moving photos into Drive use up my storage?
Yes. Drive keeps every file exactly as uploaded and counts all of it against your cap. Nothing in Drive will shrink them for you later.
Can PixelCinch work on Google Photos directly?
No. It only works on images in Google Drive, including shared drives. Move the photos into Drive first, then shrink them there.
Does IT need to approve it?
PixelCinch asks only for access to the files each person picks, not the rest of their Drive or the domain. Images are compressed in the browser and never sent to a PixelCinch server. If your admin restricts third-party apps, that setting still applies.
Related: does Google Drive compress photos? · HEIC to JPG in Google Drive · compress images in a shared drive