How to Free up Space on Your IPhone
So, you’re running out of space on your iPhone. You may not have been able to download this new movie you bought to your device because there is no space there. Your iPhone may have gotten the dreaded “Memory nearly full” warning. However, you have been notified that you are running out of space, it doesn’t matter: your iPhone is filling up and you should probably look into this sooner when it is less critical than later when you really need to do something and I can not.
Check what is taking up all of your space
Before you start setting it up, moving it, or deleting files and apps, you should take a few minutes to assess your iPhone’s storage situation. Perhaps you already have a good idea of what the problem is: perhaps you know that you enjoy watching a ton of offline movies on your device; you keep seeing the “unplayed podcast” counter ticking higher and higher; or you’ve shot two thousand shots at your favorite music festival.
Grab your almost full iPhone, click Settings, click General, and click iPhone Storage. You will see what should be a familiar sight: a small graph that shows how much space you have to work and what types of data – apps, media, photos, or mysterious “other” – populate your iPhone. … Right below it, you’ll see a list of your apps, ranked in descending order of the place they and their data take on your device.
You can click on any app to see how much space the app takes up and how much space is used by the documents and data associated with it. This is important because if you are using the iOS Unload App feature, it will only remove the amount listed in the App Size section. In the case of my podcast app, for example, it’s only 36.4 MB – hardly worth it if the outstanding podcasts (all of them 7.4 gigabytes) are the problem.
What I find more useful is a little line under the name of each app on the iPhone storage home screen that tells you when you actually last used it. I’m sure we all suffer from the same problem: we find apps or games that seem super interesting and put them on our devices (and maybe even shuffle them into the “to try” folder). Then we never use them. Or we try them once, forget about them and swear to ourselves that we will play this game when we have more free time.
So, this is a great time to go through your list of apps and take Thanos away from anything you’ve never touched, touched in over a year, or used so rarely that they’re probably not worth it, especially if they’re at the top of the list. ” occupying the place “.
What about your photos and videos?
I take a decent amount of photos with my iPhone 8 Plus and they leave almost no dent in the 256GB of space on my device. However, maybe you do more than me, or you love to shoot 4K video or something. If the purple Media bar is taking up most of your iPhone’s memory, it might be time to start cleaning up a bit.
First, go back to the main iPhone settings app, scroll down a bit and tap Photos. Make sure your device is set up to use iCloud Photos (assuming you have storage space for your media) and that “Optimize iPhone storage” is checked. This way your original media will move to the cloud and your device will download smaller versions if or when you run out of space on your iPhone.
You can also physically connect your iPhone to a Mac or PC and then manually transfer photos and videos from the device. The third option is to install a third-party app like Google Photos that will let you upload everything to the cloud – for free – with some restrictions . (If you’re shooting a lot of 4K videos, you’ll want to manually offload them as Google Photos will scale them down to 1080p if you’re not paying for storage.)
Once you’ve backed up all your files elsewhere – on your computer or in the cloud – you can delete them from your iPhone. Be sure to also clear your recently deleted album in Photos, or your device won’t free up space for 40 days.
When you’re done, head back to the Settings app and scroll down a bit until you can tap on Camera. Make sure your iPhone is not set to Save Normal Photo, which means it saves two images – a regular version and a mixed exposure version – whenever you use the camera’s HDR mode. (If you’re like most, you’re probably using Auto HDR anyway.)
While you’re here, click Formats and make sure you’re shooting Apple High Efficiency or HEIF / HEVC photos and videos and not JPEG / H.264.
Consider deleting (and downloading less) your music
If you are an Apple Music user, go back to the iPhone Settings app, scroll down a bit and click Music. Look for Downloaded Music, which should tell you how much space you’re spending on albums and songs taken from Apple’s streaming service.
You can click Downloaded Music to view all downloaded music taking up space on your device by artist. To remove anything, click Edit in the upper right corner and select the artists you no longer need for offline listening. (You can also click on any artist list – for example, Unknown artist – for more details on your deletions.)
Also, finding and tapping the Music app on the iPhone Storage screen we started with is also a quick way to delete any music on your device. You will find the same screen there as if you clicked on “Downloaded Music”.
Don’t forget about all those movies you downloaded
You can do the same process – find the TV or Videos app under iPhone Storage and tap it – to delete any episodes or movies you’ve synced to your device.
I find it just as easy to open the TV and look for the required Loaded section in the Library section. Tap that, tap a movie or show you no longer want to see on your device, and tap the word “Loaded” next to the little checkmark. After that click “Delete download”.
Clean up your messages
I’ve touched on this before , but if you need a quick reminder on how to shorten your messages on iOS, this is it. Go back to iPhone storage – in the Settings app, tap General and find Messages. Click on that and your iPhone will probably ask if you want to check if you need any “big attachments” your friends have sent you. Otherwise, you can click on the various Documents & Data categories, including Conversations, Photos, and Videos, to delete anything that might be taking up too much space on your iPhone.
You can also visit the Messages section in the main iPhone Settings app and choose a shorter message history so your device will automatically free up space by automatically deleting old items. Anyway, how many of us come back and view text messages sent over a year ago? Be sure to configure the same settings for the audio messages, which you will find a little lower on the message settings screen.
Don’t download iTunes content automatically
Here’s one quick trick to prevent your device from filling up invisibly: in the iTunes and App Store section of your device’s Settings app, make sure you uncheck all the boxes for automatic download (except for updates that are important. So if you buy an app or a movie from another device associated with the same Apple ID, it will not be automatically downloaded to your iPhone either.