Google Photos will help free up space on your device

One of the best automatic photo back up apps just got a little better

What’s the one thing hogging your phone’s storage? For me, it’s photos—I have a few thousand just sitting there, waiting for I don’t know what. We don’t realize how much space our media takes up, making the unlimited nature of services like Google Photos a huge boon for phones that quickly run out of space. Those 16GB iPhones wouldn’t survive otherwise.

Well, Google Photos is becoming even more important to your storage—at least on Android. A Google product engineer named John Elstone explained the new feature available on Android today, and it’s all about freeing up space on your device.

Now when you back your photos up to Google’s servers, the search giant’s Google Photos app will ask if you want to “Free Up Space” on your device. This feature will bulk-delete copies of photos that have already been backed up, freeing your phone up for even more selfies.

In addition to helping users free up space on their devices, Google will also helpfully delete photos straight from your SD card. And if you’re a big user of Google Photos on the Web, you now have the option to downgrade your account from “Original quality” to “High quality,” the latter of which offers unlimited storage.

The feature is currently rolling out to Android, and will presumably make its way to iOS sometime soon. It’s always a smart move to keep multiple copies of media in case a cloud service like Google Photos fails. But if you absolutely need to free up space, Google will help delete whatever you’ve already backed up to Photos.