If you've been using Gmail for a while now, or have been making good use of your Google Drive, the free 15 GB storage might not seem like enough. Before deciding whether to upgrade your storage, you can do a quick search to clear your Gmail account of large and unneeded emails.

Unsurprisingly, Google's Gmail search functions are pretty robust. You can search by date, recipient, keyword, and most importantly for this trick, by file size.

There are several operators you can use when searching for emails by size:

  • Search for specific sizes. If you want to find all emails that are 5 MB, use Size:5M.
  • Search for all emails exceeding a certain size. If you want to find all emails larger than 5 MB, use Larger:5M.
  • Search for all emails under a certain size. If you want to find all emails smaller than 5 MB, use Smaller:5M.
  • Search for all emails with attachments, exceeding a certain size. If you want to find all emails with attachments larger than 5 MB, use has attachment larger:5M.

To see this process in action, check out the video below:

Go through those emails and decide what you want to delete, what you need to backup to an external harddrive or another cloud storage account. Remember, moving those emails to the Google Drive associated with that email account will not reduce your storage usage.

Cleaning up your Google Drive files is a little more challenging. You can't search or sort by size, but if you use the following URL...

drive.google.com/#quota

...you can see your entire list of files automatically sorted in order of largest first.

What tips or tricks do you use to keep your Gmail and Google Drive storage manageable? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Cairo via Flickr