[Closed] Chromebook - "you will not be able to send or receive emails"

You've used all your allocated google storage up. Gmail is part of that storage hence the suspension of your sending/receiving. Doesn't matter where you access your gmail, Chromebook, PC, tablet. It's all using the same cloud storage and so will be suspended until you a) clear down some data on the cloud b) buy more storage.

You "only" get 15Gb free so if you've used up 1Tb then you've a lot of clearing down to do 🙂

It's not a matter of clearing down the Chromebook SSD, that will be pretty small. The issue is with what you're storing in the cloud.

that makes sense, thanks.

didnt know about the 15Gb either, so thanks for clearing that up, ill start deleting stuff.

cheers

Storage is shared across drive, photos, gmail, etc so if you're way over the free 15GB then when you drop down stuff will stop working unless you clear things out or buy more storage again.

With Photos you can choose to store in full original version (which comes out of your storage space) or let Google compress them a bit and get unlimited without counting against the allowance.

Visit https://www.google.com/settings/storage to see your current state of play and where the storage is being used (view details link under the pie chart).

Will also show you pricing options if you did decide to pay for additional storage.

How much space do you need? (how much are you currently using) Google drive is IMO competitively priced for cloud storage.

£2 a month gives you 100gb.
£10 a month brings you back to 1TB.
(or you could you know buy another chromebook!)

I personally pay for 100 gb and that is enough for me to have a cloud backup of my photos, my documents and keep gmail running. Having a local backup as well is still important,but using a service like this is an easy and cheap way to ave an offsite backup, whilst still being able to access my stuff from whatever device i am on.

G

thanks for that link, learnt more this morning than i have done in a couple of years 🙂

looks like i currently use 20Gb which is nowt in the big scheme of things. and yes, its a decent price for cloud storage, but, i just dont get on with the google cloud system. dont understand my photos at all, google photos on my phone seems different to my drive, i never quite understand why some pictures i take end up wherever they do and some dont.
then theres 'recent', 'offline' and 'downloads' which seem to have a mind of their own. google+ seems different again.

spose i just like the simple save, drag and drop of windows stylee, i seem to be forever trying to tidy up and understand the google system.

i certainly wouldnt mind paying for storage, but it seems pointless if i dont understand it. in an ideal world id have every pic i take with my phone being saved to one place thats then synced with laptop/cloud etc and available to find and view whenever i want.
same with music, download an album, song, whatever, it goes to one obvious place thats then synced with all my devices.
and you may say that google does all this, but if a doofus like me doesnt understand how, then its useless to me.

thanks for your help

Photos. I would store on a local usb drive plus another free service like Flickr (1tb free).

What's to stop you creating another gmail/google account and getting another free 15 gb ? EG sadexphoto@gmail . com ?

IMHO £24 pa for 100gb is expensive. Yes there is the backup angle that says cloud is "safe" but my £50 1tb usb drive is 5yrs old, so that's 1tb for £10pa which is 24 times cheaper.

EDIT: just checked my storage 13.8 of 17gb, 11gb google drive and 3gb for gmail. Note gmail keeps all your old messages, I have many many messages inc lots of attachments. You can purge these down

Photos. I would store on a local usb drive plus another free service like Flickr (1tb free).

What's to stop you creating another gmail/google account and getting another free 15 gb ? EG sadexphoto@gmail . com ?

i get by with computers easy enough, but i just think all this syncing and cloud storage is leaving me a bit behind. id just like a simple method of 'acquiring photos/music/files' and saving them somewhere obvious and being able to access from different devices.

thanks

As mentioned you could setup a new gmail account and use that to archive away all your photos etc. You can share a folder between accounts so accessing the pics would be easy. You can also setup the chromebook (and chrome itself) to have multiple account logins.

Must be able to print, you can print off an iPhone/iPad to a wifi network printer.

@sadex youtube uploads it depends on which account you have setup as the default. On iOS you can have the flickr app / account automatically upload all photos as per google except with 1tb storage. Yes otherwise you have to manage manually

As mentioned you could setup a new gmail account and use that to archive away all your photos etc.

just tried copying all my photos to my external drive, failed about halfway through. that happens a lot if im pasting stuff.

You can share a folder between accounts so accessing the pics would be easy.

IME best to do bulk copy in batches, eg directory by directory

hmmmm still not sure how to actually do this. ive got both my email addresses open on separate tabs, but obviously if i go to files or drive or whatever, its always going to be acc1. now say if i 'cut' a photos folder from drive, how do i actually get it to 'paste' in my second account?

Create a drive folder on account 1. Share the folder with account 2, give account 2 r/w (modify) access.

On account 2, find the shared folder (will be under the "Shared with me" drive link).

You can then copy stuff from account 2 into the shared folder. Right click on the stuff to move, select "Move to" and then navigate to the folder shared by account 1 and select the "Move" button to complete the transfer.

dont understand the last bit, ill tell you what ive done.

as you advised, i browsed to folder in drive on acc1. 'shared' with acc2.
opened 'drive' in acc2, clicked 'shared with me', yep its there, with an icon of a folder with a little man inside or somethings to show its shared.

right clicked that, looked at the options and chose to 'add to my drive'. so now ive got the same folder in 'shared with me' and 'drive', both with the shared folder icon.

is it now safe to delete this folder from acc1? yes it should then remove it from 'shared with me' in acc2, but will the 'copied' folder still remain in 'drive' on acc2?

EDIT: grrrr i dont think it will. the shared folder is all my music in FLAC, mp3 and mp4 vids, a big old unit. the bumph at bottom of drive says 160Mb of 15Gb used up, so its obviously not seeing it as storage.

give up with this bluddy thing.

i have drives of acc1 and 2 open in different tabs. click the empty space in drive2, choose upload folder, choose a music folder from my external drive and it says not enough space, buy more etc. if i try with a smaller folder it allows it.

problem is, chromebooks dont list sizes, so ive no idea how big the folders are, but theyve got to be within the 15Gb limit because.....

acc1 which contains this music folder is 21Gb and contains loooooads of other stuff too. but even if it didnt, my music folder is subdivided into flac, mp3 and mp4. now im no mathemetician, but if i try all of those separately, one of them [i]has to be[/i] less than 15Gb. so whys it saying each one is too big??

'kin thing, itll be flying out the window soon.

Silly question, but if you have 2x tabs open in the same browser won't the cookies set just assume your logged into whichever account was logged into last?

For example. If I logged into Google with test@gmail.com account, then opened another tab and went to Google, it would be logged in as test@gmail.com. So to enter another account I would have to log out, and log in with test2@gmail.com, which would log me out in the first tab. The tab will be open, but I'd be logged in as test2@gmail.com so would just be looking at the same account once I clicked a link in the tab.

What I am saying is, maybe use an incognito tab for one of the accounts, and double check your are 100% logged in to the separate accounts.

You can't be logged into two accounts in the same browser.

What Jamie says is correct. To use another account in the same session you need incognito mode.

OP, Just pay the £2 a month. Without being rude, if you cant work out what the people above are saying, running two gmail accounts on one chromebook is going to be a long term exercise in frustration.

Whilst i accept that you had issues previously, you have been running this setup for two years (in order for the free tier to run out), so it has worked! personally the amount of time you have spent trying to nickle and dime the situation has probably cost you more than just paying for what is an excellent service.

oh and

IMHO £24 pa for 100gb is expensive. Yes there is the backup angle that says cloud is "safe" but my £50 1tb usb drive is 5yrs old, so that's 1tb for £10pa which is 24 times cheaper.

I assume that your hard drive is accessible anywhere (i.e away from home) and on multiple devices. It also gives you access to email, document creation and synchronisation of folders across devices. If you look at it as a price for just storage, then it is more expensive, but you are comparing apples and oranges.

In terms of cloud storage, i think it is the best deal, dropbox is a pound for 20gb.

G

running two gmail accounts on one chromebook is going to be a long term exercise in frustration.

Hold up there. You can easily run two Gmail accounts on the one Chromebook, you just have to sign out completely, back to the login screen again.

Remember that there is no such thing as a Gmail account, it's a Google account, and governs access to all the Google services. If you want to share files between different users, you use the share feature. So if one account has the 100Gb you can put the music on that one and share it with the other.

Aside from the gmail/google thing, I agree that for 50p a week, I'd just renew the storage subscription. Just buy one less....well, whatever costs 50p these days...a week. 8)

i just dont get on with the google cloud system. dont understand my photos at all, google photos on my phone seems different to my drive, i never quite understand why some pictures i take end up wherever they do and some dont.

Missed this first time around. If you wanted to fix this, I don't mind helping. Usually it's just a case of a rogue setting on a device, or some such.

ok, firstly the 2 separate 'drives' in one browser.
my first attempt at this was copy the Music folder in acc1 whilst being logged in as acc1. log out, add user, create acc2 on chromebook, log in, go to drive, right click for paste and er..... paste is greyed out. so i assumed the clipboard doesnt carry over to different log ins.
i also thought theres no way of accessing both drives on same log in, but i thought id try anyway.
drive.google.com takes you to the drive youre logged in as. hit the top right icon for my accounts, and in there ive got accounts for 4 different gmail 'addresses'. select acc2 in a new tab, and i now have both accounts 'drives' open in 2 different tabs on same browser in acc1 login. is this what youre saying cant be done?
if it helps to describe it, the web addresses of both drives are drive.google.com/drive, then the variation is the end of the address, /u/0/my-drive, and u/1/my-drive.
hope that helps clear up what ive been trying. but, my problem seems to be slightly different in that drive 2 (currently at 15Gb) says the folder from my external drive is too big, when its less than 15Gb.

OP, Just pay the £2 a month. Without being rude, if you cant work out what the people above are saying, running two gmail accounts on one chromebook is going to be a long term exercise in frustration.

Whilst i accept that you had issues previously, you have been running this setup for two years (in order for the free tier to run out), so it has worked! personally the amount of time you have spent trying to nickle and dime the situation has probably cost you more than just paying for what is an excellent service.

I assume that your hard drive is accessible anywhere (i.e away from home) and on multiple devices. It also gives you access to email, document creation and synchronisation of folders across devices.

Missed this first time around. If you wanted to fix this, I don't mind helping. Usually it's just a case of a rogue setting on a device, or some such.

1. my ideal end result is every picture i take goes into my gallery, is then 'synced' with google photos, and google photos is the same on both phone and chromebook.
say i take a load of pics on holiday. id like every pic to automatically be saved online, and at my convenience put them into a folder called 'holiday' alongside all the other folders i would create such as 'work', 'family', 'holiday2' etc.
pretty much the same as i would arrange a windows file system.
but if i go into my google photos now (on my drive), theres just thousands of photos all arranged by date, no subdivisions. most of these are whatsapp type pics of sh1t that people have put into the various whatsapp groups im in, not my photos.
there are no folders.
if i now use the 'google photos' app on chromebook, it has some albums i created a while ago to try and tidy my photos up. theyre not there in the drive photos system tho.
i would like them to be able to have subfolders too, especially holidays. so one holidays folder can have a folder for each separate holiday. this is how theyre divided up on my external hard drive (using windows to create). if i could replicate that on google photos id be happy.

2. same with music, if i buy online/rip cds, id like them to be in one Music folder arranged under different album/band names and 'google play music' to pick up on them being there so i can use that as a music player. so all the music i have ever ended up with, old cd rips, new purchases online, all to be accessible from one player if i decide to listen to a bit of music. not 'lets see whether its in google play, no its not there, ah its in a folder on my drive, is it in the offline folder, downloads folder, ah **** it ill find it in deezer'.
as it is, i think back in the day i uploaded loads of stuff to google play, nothing else has gone in since, theres duplicate versions of most cds in there for some reason, its a mess, so i dont use it, i pay for deezer instead.

thanks for bearing with me chaps. i realise the answer to all this could just be to buy a windows laptop and drag and drop to my hearts content 🙂

[quote=molgrips said]
Hold up there. You can easily run two Gmail accounts on the one Chromebook, you just have to sign out completely, back to the login screen again.

You don't even have to go that far, you can be logged in to multiple google accounts in Chrome, all within one logon session.

Go to the gmail inbox and on the far top right click on your account icon and select "Add account". You'll be asked for the alternate google account logon details and then you're logged in to that account too. Drive, gmail etc all work.

My PC has photo folders in the traditional Windows style. I have some high-level topics (Hiking/Biking/Family etc) then folders in those for specific dates or trips. Everything is synced to Google Photos but I lose the folder structure. HOWEVER, I've come around to the idea that it may be unnecessary. The Search function in Photos makes locating particulate photos or sets of photos quite easy. I can type in a date (e.g. August 2014) and it'll show those photos. I can also search by Subject (e.g. Bike Snow) and it'll show photos of bikes in the snow. Combine that with the date search and it does most of what I want. If only we had the US search option of Person then I think that would cover 99.9% of my requirements.

As for seeing WhatsApp photos, you should be able to restrict what folders are being synced. The Photos App on my Phone lets me know if a new Images folder has been created and asks me if I want to include that in the Sync process.

The photos app is probably set to show all photos by date instead of by folder. Ifound you are looking at a 'camera roll' or 'photo stream' then this is likely.

But you haven't said why you are trying to copy files from one drive to another? You shouldn't need to do this.

molgrips said »
Hold up there. You can easily run two Gmail accounts on the one Chromebook, you just have to sign out completely, back to the login screen again.
You don't even have to go that far, you can be logged in to multiple google accounts in Chrome, all within one logon session.

Go to the gmail inbox and on the far top right click on your account icon and select "Add account". You'll be asked for the alternate google account logon details and then you're logged in to that account too. Drive, gmail etc all work.

I did not say you cant easily - i was pointing out that the original poster is having difficulty doing this, as his posts allude too, and that if he is struggling to manage one account, running multiple accounts i cant see ending in any more clarity. KISS.

Sadexpunk.
re photos. Think of google drive and google photos as 2 separate things. Google drive is just storage, all your photos exist there, but in one big folder of images. Google Photos is a way that you can interact with that folder of images.

Like most things googley, they leverage search to enable you to do what you want. go to google photos on he web and in the search bar, search for a location you have been to. Google has some clever (but not infallible) algorithims which allow them to categorise and understand the contents of your photos. for example search for "meat" and revel at all the pictures of bacon you have taken. or "car" and see all the ones which contain a car.

You an organise your photos into albums, in google photos, but it never actually moves your photos into a separate folder containing those photos, rather it adds some data to the image saying that it belongs in this folder. This does mean that you could have one photo which exists in multiple albums! it doesn't copy your photo, it just says it should exist in both albums. Another way of thinking about it is, An album is just a saved search.

Google leverages search to find what you want, meaning you do not have to create massively complex file structures.

G

edit: what scotroutes said, whilst i was typing.

But you haven't said why you are trying to copy files from one drive to another? You shouldn't need to do this.

thanks for the explanations of google photos/drive etc, i sort of understand it a bit better now, but it still seems complicated. as i mentioned, id much prefer the neatness of a tidy file/folder structure, for example an overall 'holidays' folder containing 'holiday1' 'holiday2' holiday3' etc.
i just tried as you suggested with the seach, and indeed found some holiday pics from zante 2013 when i put that into the search bar, but i suppose id also like to be able to easily locate 'that funny pic of grandad falling through a deckchair in our garden at that barbecue' without having to think 'ooooh now that was about 3 years ago and must have been summer' if you see what i mean?
neat folders and subfolders 🙂

thanks for all your help, im understanding it a bit better, but i spose im still having no success at freeing up space on one drive without totally deleting stuff, or being happy with my photo and music locations. it may be impossible for me to do what i want.

thanks

EDIT: just to confuse me even more, as well as a google photos folder in my drive (with the google photos app icon), ive just found another google photos folder in there too (with a normal folder icon). this is divided into years and months 2015>01, 02, 03, 04 etc.
*sighs 😀

id also like to be able to easily locate 'that funny pic of grandad falling through a deckchair in our garden at that barbecue' without having to think 'ooooh now that was about 3 years ago and must have been summer

well thats it, i dont have a current structure (its what im striving for) unless you mean my external drive?

and itd be under Family > BBQs or somethings like that. seems to me theres so many pics that google wouldnt be able to find as thered be no specific description for what you were trying to find....

[quote=sadexpunk ]well thats it, i dont have a current structure (its what im striving for) unless you mean my external drive?
and itd be under Family > BBQs or somethings like that.
Aye - that's what I was meaning. But would you remember what year/month it was? Or what if, for instance, you cycled to get the BBQ. Would you file it under cycling or BBQ? It's these sorts of conundrums that are convincing me the Google Search option might actually be a better idea 🙂

Aye - that's what I was meaning. But would you remember what year/month it was? Or what if, for instance, you cycled to get the BBQ. Would you file it under cycling or BBQ? It's these sorts of conundrums that are convincing me the Google Search option might actually be a better idea

id also like to be able to easily locate 'that funny pic of grandad falling through a deckchair in our garden at that barbecue'

But then you add your own tag of 'that barbecue' when you import them.

But then you add your own tag of 'that barbecue' when you import them.

OP, i don't think google photos is for you. To be honest, no photo management product is for you, as i am struggling to think of any one which would be able to create a file structure such as you have described. Not folder/subfolder but family/bbq, the best you will get is year/month/date of import.

There is nothing to stop you creating your own (frankly crazy) folder structure outside of google photos. However you will have to manually import all of your own photos from all of your devices. That is the real nub of the problem, you are trying to bend googles offerings to how you see they should be used, you want the benefits of auto backup, and ease of access across devices, but are not willing to accept the compromise.

Which is more important to you? auto upload / back up of photos from your phone / other devices, and access from all devices at the cost of using search. Or a file/folder structure at the cost of having to manually administer your photo library and remembering to having to import and categorise everything.

None of this solves your first problem (running out of storage), which ironically one of the solutions was to manually manage a file structure, which you seem to have failed to do.

Good luck,

G

think you're right, i need a good talk to myself to decide which way to go.
have i got a viable alternative? would a nas solve my problems? never really looked into what theyll do. would i be able to access my home nas remotely to find photos/play music?

im not too fussed about auto back ups, i spose most of the photos i take or receive through whatsapp say are sh1t and wouldnt be a great loss, (in fact theyre part of the problem, theres so may of them i struggle to find photos ive actually wanted to take). its just holiday pics for instance, [i]that i decide to back up as and when [/i]into a folder that i decide to name, thatd be good for me.

thanks

yep i know youre right, theres workarounds,

It's not a workaround - it's a better solution. I think you'd benefit from learning how to use the more powerful system than simply 'preferring' the way you've always done it. You'll be better off in the long run.

ok, point taken, ill try and understand it better.

one thing that puzzles me for starters then..... when i did a search say on 'zante 2013' it found a load of pics from er.... zante 2013. how did it know? is it because somewhere back in 2013 i would have created an album somewhere? or did it know when i took them that i was in zante and tagged them automatically?

and going back to the 'grandad at bbq' situation. would i have to tag each photo i ever take with anything relevant that i may want to search on in future? or should i create an album for that bbq say with all the pics for that day inside?

thanks

There's metadata attached to every photo. Phones and some cameras that have GPS out the location information in the metadata.

Being Good, it could also have done something like read your holiday confirmation email and emails to friends etc and conclude you were on holiday and where.

Re the tagging, I would look for a way to tag every image uploaded at a certain time with the same tag. So you go to your folks say for Christmas 2016, take a load of photos then you sit down and upload them in one go and you put Christmas 2016 in the tags. And you could also out 'parebts' as another.

It might notice you were at your parents from location information automatically, but it might also do something like recognise faces. Some organisers do this. So you can search for pics of 'minipunk' and it has already indexed the pictures of him/her/it.

I bet if you search for 'bike' it finds bike pictures....

The EXIF data in the image file will have the date already. If you're using a camera phone or suitable camera it may even have GPS information.

No here's a scary thing, I just did a search on Forth Bridge. It through up 13 photos, 12 of which have the Forth Bridge somewhere in the background. I've never tagged any of these.... 🙂

Try some random searches in your Google Photos. You might be surprised at what it can find.

I wouldn't bother tagging, google photos has some pretty nifty image recognition software, it basically knows what is in your photos andauto tags them.

I gave some examples earlier, but how it works does not matter, it is that it does work!

For example, if i search for fireworks, it returns pictures of fireworks, even though i have not tagged them, and they did not occur on a specific date.

TRY IT!!!! think of a photo you want to find. search for a date range, or a location or in the case of the BBQ example, search for BBQ!

Seriously stop asking questions on here and sit down and try it for half an hour.

G

EDIT: what scot routes posted whilst i was typing again... that's spooky

okeydokes, ill have a play.

i think ive found out why i cant upload my music folder to acc2, although that throws up another confusing issue 🙂

just connected my external drive to an old windows laptop which shows the sizes. 3 folders in it as i mentioned, flac, mp3 and mp4. 40Gb, 26Gb and 40Gb respectively, so thats why it wouldnt upload to a 15Gb allowance (acc2).
whats confusing tho is that the drive its hosted on (acc1) only shows a total of '21Gb of 1Tb used'.

ok, trying to embrace the modern world 😀 and been having a play with the search feature, and its a bit hit and miss. sometimes impressive, a lot of times it doesnt bring up what im trying to find. ill persevere.
what ive tried doing to make it easier to find in future, is creating albums named 'BBQs' for instance, hoping that the album title will be enough of a tag to bring stuff up in a search.

couple of questions to help me on my way......

1. i started deleting cr@p pics, hundreds of whatsapp rubbish that people send to various groups im in. then i thought, what if it syncs with my gallery every week or something and sticks em all back in. is this likely to happen, or once ive deleted something, will it stay deleted? or should i delete these pics from phone gallery instead? dont really know how sync works.

2. is there a setting anywhere that means google photos will only add my camera photos rather than all this whatsapp rubbish? i know in my gallery i can choose not to display them, but what about google photos?

3. i decided to take the hit and delete my big music folder. 100Gb or so of data. its gone now, but my drive still shows that im using 21Gb of 1Tb same as before. almost as tho the music folder was never there anyway. but now ive no idea what to delete to get down below 15Gb, i dont have many videos left on there which i assume are the biggest files? any ideas why this is happening?

4. cant see a way to tag the odd individual photos that would be impossible to find by google and only i would know what they are. you know, such as 'john falling over' or 'bobs broken leg' etc. is this possible?

thanks

2. I don't use Whatsapp but is there not something in the settings that lets you specify the Save directory for it? Then you should be able to tell Photos not to sync that directory. For instance, I have Photos syncing my Camera directory. I could add Facebook, Download and Instagram

ok, i think ive found it. but the settings only available on my phones google photos, not my chromebook. ive de-selected all the whatsapp/instagram/facebook jobbies, so now google photos [i]should[/i] only show my camera pics and gallery.

which leads me onto a related question (you just knew it would didnt you) 😀
in my phones gallery, i can show/hide albums (so whatsapp/instagram/facebook etc). but i assume theyre always there, just not shown, because as soon as i select whatsapp say, they appear in my gallery again.
now does google photos, when it syncs to 'gallery only' know not to show the whatsapp pics? so whatever i select to show in gallery, its independant of the settings in google photos?

so i can show/not show whatever i like in gallery, but if ive deselcted them all in google photos, they wont appear?

sorry if that sounds confusing, hope you understand what im asking. im getting there i think 😀

thanks

hope i havent bored you to death with this as the answers seem to have dried up 🙂

1,2,3,4 ^^^ still 'open to answers' 😀

added to that now is something else i dont understand. i spent quite a while yesterday deleting about 1000 whatsapp pics from my chromebooks 'google photos'.
but, theyre all still in my phones 'google photos'! also my phone is set to [b]not[/b] save whatsapp pics. why are they still there?

any idea why my chromebook and phone dont show the same pics? if i delete from one shouldnt it delete from the other?

thanks

I don't know mate - I am only guessing, I don't use any of this software 🙂

Although in my experience these drive thingies seem to hide their data in different places. I think in OneDrive when you go to it in your browser, it's not in the root of the whole thing - it's in the root of your file area. There's another layer above that, from which you can get to the places that would normally be hidden, like your camera and phone backup etc.

thanks for the answer, but dont really understand it, spose thats the problem tho 🙂

ive [i]sort of[/i] discovered why my 'data used' didnt go down when i deleted the big folder. it went into the bin, which still counted as data 🙂 so i had to empty bin too. now its a manageable 9Gb used which means ill be able to use my gmail now 🙂
what it doesnt explain tho is why a 100Gb folder only knocks my data used down to 9Gb from 21Gb. ah well, not worth losing sleep over, dont think ill ever understand it.

thanks

I didn't know about the photo search thing, that is amazing. Going to bulk upload all of my pictures now.

I typed in BMW out of interest and it came up with a load of pictures with BM's just in the fore/background, even one where you could only see half a wheel and a door.