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Our phones are just one part of our iPhones. They are where we store our photos, books, music, and movies, but they also have the apps we use daily for work, socializing, ordering groceries, transportation, managing finances, and even our health. It is easy to quickly take up all of the phone's storage, which can become a nightmare.
Don't panic. If you're on the verge of running out of space, you don't necessarily need to upgrade your phone or take a photo. We will show you how to create space with nine things you can do, many of which are free.
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If you want to check what's taking up the most of the space on your phone, go to settings, click on General, and then tap iPhone Storage. You can find a breakdown of the files, media, and apps that are eating up your space there. If you want to have enough space to install more apps and take photos, aim to remove at least 2GB of storage.
Head to Settings and click on General.
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Then click on iPhone Storage.
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You’re there!
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You will soon find that photos and videos are taking up a lot of your space. You can learn how to back up your photos and videos to a cloud storage service like Apple's iCloud. You should keep copies of your memories safely stored away, so that you don't have to worry about accidentally wiping them off your phone.
You will have to pay 99 cents a month for up to 50 gigabytes of storage, even though the first 5 gigabytes of storage is free. You can learn more about the more expensive plans here if you need more space.
If you have deleted photos from the Apple store in the past 30 days, they are still in the Recently deleted folder in your Photos app, so make sure you remove them there as well. You can find it by going to the Albums tab. The Select button is in the upper right corner.
You can save space by setting up your phone to save smaller photos and larger images in the cloud. Make sure the checkmark next to the Optimize iPhone Storage option is turned on when you head to Photos.
If you don't have time to think about what to do with the space on your phone, you just want a quick and easy way to get rid of it. Below the color-coded bar that shows how much storage apps, photos, the system, and other settings are taking up, you can click on Review Large Attachments. Here, you can see a list of photos and videos you've sent or received in messages, and you can remove them by placing your thumb on one of them and clicking the red button.
The first couple at the top are likely to be videos, as they occupy the most amount of storage. If I'm on the go and don't have a lot of time to think through which apps, photos, or videos I really don't have, I sometimes find that deletion of these gives me a bit more storage.
Once again, head to Settings and click on General.
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Then click on iPhone Storage.
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Click on Review Large Attachments to see a list of videos and photos you’ve sent or received.
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Click on your Messages app to remove old conversations you don't need anymore. If you want, you can also have your phone automatically remove messages. Click on the Keep Messages option under the message history to scroll down and tap on it. You can choose whether you want your phone to keep messages for 30 days, one year, or forever.
Once you’re in Settings, click on Messages.
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Once in Messages, scroll down and tap on Keep Messages.
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You can then click on which option you’d prefer.
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If you have the time, you should definitely uninstall apps you no longer want to use. When you head to settings, select General, and click iPhone Storage, Apple will show you the last time you used certain apps.
If you don't want to lose the data associated with the app, you can take it away. When you uninstall it, your documents and data will not be available. Once again, you need to head back to settings, click on general, and then tap on iPhone Storage. Click on the app to load it.
Click on General under Settings.
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Tap on iPhone Storage under General.
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Tap on the app you wish to offload.
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Click on Offload App.
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You can prevent your phone from running out of space in the future by going to the App Store option under settings andggling on the offload unused apps switch.
Under Settings click App Store.
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Toggle on Offload Apps under App Store.
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I had no choice but to uninstall most of my apps back in the day when I had an old 32GB iPhone. It made me realize I only used a few of them because of the files they stored.
Adding links to the files I needed to my home screen would allow me to access them as if they were apps. It was even easier to access those files this way, rather than having to open up and search for them on the internet. Adding links to news sites saved me some space, and I started adopting this approach to other apps as well.
If you can easily look up information on the web or use a search engine, you may want to consider this approach. You can add a home screen by going to the bottom of the screen and clicking on the square icon with an arrow inside, then clicking on the Add to Home Screen option located towards the bottom of the list. You should be able to find it on your screen if you tap on Add.
On the Safari app, click on the square icon with an arrow inside right at the center bottom.
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Click on Add to Home Screen.
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Then click on Add.
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The data and documents stored within an app on your phone can take up the most amount of storage. You can find out if that is the case by going to the settings and clicking on an app. A page will show you how much space is taken up by both documents and data. You can use that information to get rid of Ebooks, close tabs in your browser, or remove specific episodes from the app.
Tap on General under Settings.
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Click on iPhone Storage under General.
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Click on the app.
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Check Documents & Data.
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Deleting apps, photos, and videos will free up a good chunk of your storage, but clearing your web browser cache can give you a bit more space if you are in a crunch. If you go down this route, you will be signed out of websites.
Clear History and Website Data can be found in the settings section of the browser.
Click on Safari under Settings.
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Under Safari, click Clear History and Website Data.
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There are more steps to take if you use the internet browser. Click on the three dots at the bottom to open the browser. You can see a list of what you can clear when you tap on History. You will be able to choose whether to remove browsing history, save passwords, cookies, and site data or not. You can remove your browsing history from the last hour, the last 24 hours, a week, the last four weeks, or from all time by clicking the appropriate option under Time Range. Clear Browsing Data can be found at the bottom after you have made your selections.
Tap on History after clicking the three dots at the bottom.
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Click Clear Browsing Data.
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Select which options you want. Click Time Range. if you want to specify the time frame you want to be cleared.
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If you chose Time Range, select the option you prefer.
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After you’ve made your selections, click Clear Browsing Data.
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I only use it for a second camera and private storage space. I downloaded it once because I was about to run out of space to take pictures. Thankfully, despite the fact that my phone's storage was technically full, I was able to use the app to take and store both videos and photos since the app saves its Memories in the cloud. If you need to take pictures on the go, this could be a good hack.
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