These Apps Are Secretly Clogging Your Camera Roll

If you want to declutter your phone and free up memory, start with photos—media files take up more space than you think. To keep your camera from filling up with junk, you also need to play around with the settings because some apps put memory killers in there without you even realizing it.

Apps can automatically save images to your Camera Roll.

Some apps like Instagram and WhatsApp can automatically save media to your phone. I found out about this last year when I was added to a WhatsApp chat with several hundred people from an organization I am involved with. I immediately disabled the thread because I’m antisocial, but I started noticing strange photos and screenshots in my camera roll. and could not remember how he took them. I was extremely upset for several days. It turns out that the participants in this chat were sending each other restaurant reviews, photos of their daily adventures, and much more – and all this ended up in the memory of my phone.

To disable this in WhatsApp, go to Settings, then Storage & Data. You will see a section called “Startup Media” which will include photos, audio, video, and documents. You need to tap each one and select the “never” option, otherwise they will continue to download to your phone when you are connected to Wi-Fi.

On Instagram, open Settings and go to Archiving and Uploading. In the “Save to Camera Roll” section, uncheck the “Keep original photos” and “Save story to camera roll” checkboxes.

In Facebook Messenger, go to Settings and select Photos & Media. Make sure the “Save photos and videos” checkbox is unchecked. In general, when downloading a new app, carefully read the requested permissions and don’t let the app automatically save images—or just go straight to settings and turn it off from the start.

Finally, for a general space-saving tip if you’re using an iPhone, go to Settings and select Photos. There, make sure “Optimize iPhone Storage” is selected so that lower resolution versions of your pictures and media are stored on your device, and you only access the higher resolution versions when you tap on them, which will cause you to download them again from iCloud . No matter what phone you have, if you use Google Photos, you can delete local copies of photos by tapping “Free up space” in the Library tab. You can also choose the quality of your media backup by going to Settings, then Restore Storage, and clicking Convert Existing Photos and Videos to Storage.

Easily delete automatically downloaded media files

If you have an iPhone, you can easily find and delete anything that automatically downloads from an app using the search bar in the Photos app. Enter the name of the application and everything created there will be displayed. I just searched for “WhatsApp” and unfortunately got 140 results, none of which I want or need on my phone. Select them all, delete them, and make sure this doesn’t happen again by correcting your settings.