Delete Photos in Google Drive
Google Drive has made life easier for computer users by providing them a platform they can use to save photos, videos, documents and so much more online. It is an extremely secure tool and allows users to access their data while on the move.
In July this year, Google announced in a blog post a raft of changes to the way Google Drive and Google Photos sync with each other. To put it in the simplest way, the sync mechanism between these 2 services has ended for good.
People used to get confused about photos/ videos saved on 1 medium appearing on its own in the other one. And the biggest one, an item deleted by mistake in 1 medium would automatically be removed from the other one because of the synchronization.
As a result of the changes rolled out on 10th July 2019, any photos/ videos added to Google Drive won’t appear on their own in Google Photos (and vice versa). There is a method, however, to fetch items from Google Drive (including the Shared with me items) to Google Photos. This requires users to select the Google Drive option in the Upload menu, which will create a copy of the image in Google Photos. But the catch here is that since changes aren’t synced like they used to be before, any edits you make on the image in Google Photos won’t be replicated to the item in Google Drive. Good or bad? It depends on how you view it.
But, what about the Google Photos folder in Google Drive? And what about the Google Drive specific images? Get rid of them from Google Drive, and move them all to Google Photos. Google allows users to upload an unlimited number of items to Google Photos, as far as users select the High quality option while uploading them.
When all the photos are present at a single, centralized location, you can manage them easily. This saves you from searching across subdirectories in Google Drive (and even coming across duplicates, that further complicate matters). This is just a glimpse of the hassle you could have possibly landed yourself into.
Deleting the Photos
Let’s now take a quick look at 3 methods that will help you get rid of photos from your Google Drive account. So let’s begin.
Delete them Online
This is the safest and quickest of all the methods that you can employ to delete photos from your Google Drive. However, it might require some effort on your part. The steps are very easy and straightforward.
- Open up Google Drive.
- Click anywhere between the Search Drive text and the downward pointing arrow (at the far end of the search box).
- Select Photos & images from the menu that pops up. Google Drive will now search and bring up a list of the entire collection of photos and images saved on your Google Drive account.
Searching for Photos & images
- Select all the items and delete them.
- Repeat step # 2 and this time select Videos.
Searching for Videos
- Purge all the search results.
Delete the Google Photos Folder
Some of you might have enabled the option that resulted in all your Google Photos items copied to a Google Photos folder on your Google Drive. Since we explained in some detail in the beginning that these services no longer sync with each other, you can safely proceed to delete that folder without worrying about the items in Google Photos.
Deleting this folder will fix a great degree of photos and videos that caused clutter. And if you had uploaded these items in their Original quality, these photos were counting towards the storage space you were consuming in Google Drive. Deleting this folder will free up that amount of storage space as well.
Delete with Backup and Sync
This is a secondary method to delete Google Drive photos, and should only be used if you are absolutely sure about the exact whereabouts of your Google Drive photos collection.
This method will require you to search for image types and then clean up all photos that appear in the search results. If you’re sure about the folders that contain the photos, you can save yourself the trouble of searching for photos, and proceed to delete the specific folders right away.
- Open up the Google Drive folder on your computer.
- Navigate to the folder that contains the images.
- If the folder contains images only, you can delete the entire folder straightaway.
- Alternatively, if the folder contains other files as well, you will have to search for images. This will require you to search in the root Google Drive folder on your computer because it will search in all the folders in a single go and save you all the trouble of searching again and again.
- Open up the Google Drive folders and move to the search box on the extreme right and type in the image extension. One example is using .jpg or .jpeg while searching for JPG/ JPEG image files.
- The search results might take a while to completely appear if you’ve got a huge image collection. Once you’ve found the images, use the Ctrl + A shortcut keys combination to select the images and Shift + Delete to purge them from your computer (and Google Drive also as the changes are synced).
- Repeat this process for all image types.
Note: Please remember that you will have to manually delete the items from the Trash section of your Google Drive, no matter which method you follow.

Raza Ali Kazmi works as an editor and technology content writer at Sorcim Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. He loves to pen down articles on a wide array of technology related topics and has also been diligently testing software solutions on Windows & Mac platforms.