So after my latest vacation, I got a warning that I'm coming up on my limit for free Google storage. (12GB of 15GB)

Luckily I've always had two Google accounts, so to free up some space, I transferred over some old albums to my backup account. (Shared the albums to my backup account, saved the photos there, then deleted the albums on my primary account.)

I deleted the albums as well as the actual photos/videos (since it's two separate deletes), and even emptied the trash afterward.

That was yesterday, and today my storage has not moved, it still shows 12GB used. But my backup account does show 6GB, which are the albums I moved over. So I expected to see the primary drop by 6GB. Still no dice.

I've rebooted my phone, cleared the cache on my Google Photos app, and still no dice. Any ideas?

Your Google account has a recycle bin like windows. Your deleted stuff goes there for like 30 days before permanently deleting. Check to see if they are there. That counts against your available space.

I assume you mean the trash in Google photos? If so, I emptied that, as well as in Google Drive just in case. No luck...

Only other thing I can think of is go to one.google.com

Should have a utility to tell you what contributes to your storage total.

Well I was having a similar issue on Google Drive, and I at least figured out how to fix it there. Unfortunately the same method doesn't seem to be possible on Photos, so still trying to figure it out there.

Basically, the problem is when you share any Folder, File, Album, etc, it gives access to the secondary account, but it doesn't transfer ownership of the media to that account, so even if you delete the media on the primary account, it existing on the secondary account still counts against the primary account's storage. (This isn't clear on mobile, but only on desktop.)

So on Drive, I had to go into each individual folder, select all the images, and do a transfer ownership to my secondary account. (This took some doing because simply doing it to the folder doesn't apply it to the files within.)

Not sure why Google made this so complex to figure out, but there you have it.

And now how to figure out a way to do this on Photos...

Well that does NOT appear to be the issue on Photos.

To test this out, I deleted one of the albums on my secondary account. I saw the storage freed up immediately on that account. But no storage freed up on the primary account.

Does not make sense. It appears that the same images are taking up space on both accounts, and deleting them on the secondary account (at which point they don't exist on either account) does nothing to free up that space on the primary.

Now I'm just more confused.

Well, after hours of banging my head against the wall, I finally figured it out. All photos before June 2021 did not count against your Google storage.

Of course, all the photos I migrated to my second account were from before 2021, so they freed up no storage, yet they now take up 6 GBs on that account.

I tried moving them back over, only to find they would now take up space if I added them back.

Basically, I'm out 6 GB of storage for being dumb. I screwed up.