App or strategy for stripping photos from gmail?

May 11, 2023 6:19 AM

I’m using a little over half of my allowed 15GB of free Google capacity. I’d like to clear out a lot of the large attachments from my email, but I want to keep the emails themselves. If possible, I’d especially like to automatically keep one copy of each attachment in a thread -- but if not, I'll take what I can get.

Google seems keep a separate copy of the same photo every time there’s a threaded reply to a message with that photo(!) See this for an example of that issue. There is one photo in this thread. There are ten replies. In each, of course, you can scroll down to see the prior replies, including the one with the photo. Google seems to be saving 10 copies of the photo. That’s awesome for them so that we can all run out of free storage, but I'd rather have an easy way to discard all those duplicated attachments.

Is there a reputable app or extension or strategy that automates solving that problem? I’d love to be able to tell it to strip all extra copies of attachments from all threads at once, but to keep the emails themselves, with the first copy of each attachment.

If you mention an app or extension, please let me know whether it's something you've tried and found to be non-problematic, as I tend to be wary of these things.

If I can’t have my ideal, is there an app or extension or strategy that will at least let me strip the photos off messages easily, without discarding the messages themselves? Preferably more than one email at a time, preferably by size – but if not, I’ll take what I can get? Right now, all I can do is forward the message to myself, manually stripped of all unwanted attachments, and then delete the original. It’s a pain.

My total memory usage had been pretty stable for quite a while, but recently it’s been going up noticeably faster. I think it’s because of the higher-resolution photos that my newer phone takes (which I do store in Google Photos), and the ones that I’m receiving in emails that everyone else’s newer phones take. I figure I’ll try resolving the email attachment aspect with this question. Then maybe I’ll ask another about the Google Photos aspect.

posted by daisyace to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

I have no answers - but I do have the exact same problem. I don't even wish to keep the attachments, just to delete them without deleting the emails. So I'm commenting to keep an eye on the responses.
posted by jb at 6:51 AM on May 11, 2023

The Google One app has that feature - it shows me what email attachments take up excessive space and gives me a UI to review and delete them. I don't know if Google One is available for free Google Users. I pay $2.99/mo for 200 GB of storage across Drive, Photos, and Gmail; the app is how I manage that.
posted by COD at 8:29 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

COD, does it delete the email or just the attachment? If the email as well this is also something that can be done through the account interface. I have been hoping for a solution to this as well as I would also like to keep the emails but delete the attachments.
posted by tavegyl at 8:44 AM on May 11, 2023

It looks like it deletes the email along with the attachment - so that does not help you. Never mind!
posted by COD at 8:54 AM on May 11, 2023

Response by poster: Since so far, there are more people wanting a solution than pointing one out, I'll also ask the programmers among you -- would this be a difficult thing to build? If not, is there somewhere I could post to that people look at for ideas for programming projects?
posted by daisyace at 8:55 AM on May 11, 2023

Best answer: Have you seen this? https://unattach.app/
posted by COD at 8:57 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: COD, that looks like it might be great!

Maybe a matter for another post, but short of finding someone here who can personally vouch for an app or extension like that, what's a good way to determine whether it's ok to use it, vs. something that could do some kind of harm?
posted by daisyace at 9:17 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Unattach.app authorizes with Google using Oauth, which is the right way to do it. They will never see your Gmail password, and you can revoke their access anytime. I poked around the site and it all looks legit to me. I wouldn't hesitate to use it if I needed it.
posted by COD at 10:19 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My concern with something like Unattach.app is that it might grab all my emails and do who-knows-what with them. If they already have the emails, revoking access doesn't help. Is there any way to be sure, or at least reasonably confident, that they won't do anything like that?
posted by likedoomsday at 10:38 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

There are a few answers here including Unattach and this more manual Node.js app. It's not clear to me whether the top answer still works or not. It looks like it still works for some people but may depend on the email types in the threads.
posted by yerfatma at 11:16 AM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would play around with forwarding the message to yourself and stripping the attachments out before you press send. If that works, then you are free to save the attachment(s) from the original message and then delete it. If you need the original date, add it to the subject line.
posted by soelo at 8:20 PM on May 11, 2023

Are you hoping to keep all your emails on the gmail servers, or would downloading your own copies of, say, older emails, deleting the images from the saved copies, and deleting those emails altogether from the mail server work? If the latter, you could either export everything using google's export tools (Takeout iirc?) or use third-party clients like Thunderbird to do the downloading.
posted by trig at 8:59 AM on May 12, 2023

Response by poster: Thank you! I'm probably going to get over my wariness and try Unattach at some point. If I do, I'll report back.
posted by daisyace at 3:55 PM on May 12, 2023

Well I took the plunge with Unattach, and so far am super happy with it. Fingers crossed I didn't do something stupid.
posted by tavegyl at 10:14 AM on May 13, 2023 [1 favorite]