See also the official documentation:
Help Center > Group Owners Manual > Viewing and managing your group's storage space

Managing Attachments, Files and Photos

Guidance for Owners and Moderators

This page is not intended to be a complete A – Z of operations associated with Attachments, Files, and Photos; the intention is to provide some guidance on a problem that is reported fairly often so that Group Owners and Moderators can quickly and easily carry out the relevant investigation and work out a solution that best fits their Group’s requirements.

How does the problem manifest itself?

Group Managers find that they or their members (dependent on some Settings) are unable to upload Files and / or Photographs.

What are the likely causes?

The problem is most probably caused by either the Group's storage limit having been reached, or because a Setting (or possibly more than one Setting) is incorrect, perhaps having been inadvertently changed.

What is an individual Group’s Storage Limit?

This depends on the type of group in question:  Basic (free) Groups have a 1 GB limit; Premium Groups 30 GB and Enterprise Groups 1 TB. See the details on the Groups.io Pricing page.

When your group exceeds 80% of your quota, you will receive a "Storage limit warning" message from Groups.io.

The exact text of the message may vary depending on the group setting found at Admin>Settings>Message Policies>Out of Space.

What counts towards a Group’s Storage Limit?

See Items that count towards the storage limit.

How can the actual storage used be checked?

There are two ways of doing this, of which the first is available only to owners and moderators with "Billing" permission. For instructions, see Viewing your group's storage limit and current space usage.

The second method is available to all members of a group. In the left navigation menu on a group's website, select Files or Photos. Towards the bottom of the either page, there are details of the storage occupied by Files or Photos, depending on the feature selected. On the Photos page, there is also a total of storage used by attachments, which share space with Photos. An example from a "Photos" section is shown below.

Add the figures on the two pages to determine the total storage used. 

If the total storage used is at, or very close to, the available limit, then uploads might be inhibited and one of two courses of action is likely to be necessary.

The first is an upgrade to a Premium or Enterprise group, which of course requires a payment or an increased payment. See Upgrading a Basic group.

The second is the deletion of some of the stored material; see the next section.

There is also a further course of action possible: some members have images as part of their signatures, and these are stored as attachments. Members can be asked not to have images as part of their signatures, although there can be no certainty that they will remove them. Even if they do, their removal can be effective only after previously stored "signature images" have been deleted.

Deleting Attachments, Files and Photos

A wiki page for this has already been prepared, and it is linked here.

Having looked at possible storage limitations, it is worth considering any “Settings” errors.

Settings for Attachments, Files, and Photos

How any given group handles Attachments, Files, and Photos is subject to a number of settings available only to Owners and Moderators. Separate settings apply to each of the three subject areas.

From the Tabs on the left hand side of the group page go to Admin > Settings.  This brings up the (main) Settings page; scroll down to Message Formatting, and look for Attachments, controlled by 2 drop – down menus.

The Attachments drop – down menu provides the following options:

• Allow
• Bounce
• Strip
• Moderate

The group from which the screenshot was taken does not allow attachments and they are “stripped”.

The Out of Space drop – down (only applicable if attachments are allowed in the first place) determines what happens if the storage limit is reached; the options are:

• Delete Old Attachments
• Bounce Messages.

Check that the settings match your group’s requirements. If you select "delete old attachments," attachments will be purged oldest-first, on a weekly basis. Attachments are deleted to get your group down to 95% of your quota (or less). This extra 5% "headspace" is necessary to allow you to continue to upload files and photos. See https://beta.groups.io/g/main/topic/69516487 and/or https://groups.io/g/GroupManagersForum/message/30003 for further details.

NOTE:  If an attachment is manually deleted (either by editing the message or by deleting an image from the Emailed Photos folder), its associated message will display an Edited tag in the message archive, explaining the deletion. If an attachment is purged by the above group setting, the corresponding message does not display an Edited tag. 

Scroll further down the same page to Features, and within that section Files.

The Permissions drop – down menu provides the following options:

• Subscribers can view and upload
• Subscribers can view, moderators can upload
• Subscribers cannot view, moderators can upload
• Files are disabled

There is also a checkbox that allows photos to be uploaded to the files section; they still take up some of your allotted storage space. It must be noted that this checkbox only affects the uploading of photos in a photograph format, e.g. jpg; photographs embedded in documents (e.g. Word or pdf) are not controlled by this checkbox.

Check that the settings match your group’s requirements.

Immediately below Files there are corresponding settings for Photos.

The Permissions drop – down menu provides the following options:

• Subscribers can view and upload
• Subscribers can view, moderators can upload
• Subscribers cannot view, moderators can upload
• Photos are disabled

The Max Size in Photos drop – down determines the resizing of photographs uploaded from the web UI; this is down to personal choice, but it is worth remembering that the larger the photo size allowed the more storage is used up. Once uploaded, photos can only be reduced by a potentially long and tedious process that loses the original photo “owner”. It is not a recommended course of action.

The Max Size in Email drop – down is similar, but relates to photographs attached to emails. As these count towards storage as attachments some care is also required here if the storage limit is not going to be reached too quickly.

Note: images inserted into formatted (HTML) message bodies are resized to a maximum of 1024 x 1024, if that's less than the Max size in Email setting. Inserted images also count toward the storage limit.

Check that the settings match your group's requirements.

Finally, don't forget that any Settings changes will not take effect unless the following (at the bottom of the page) is clicked:

What the User Sees

Part 2: Settings and How They Appear  (In Preparation)