The Easiest Ways to Free up Photo Storage on ICloud and IPhone
I keep looking for ways to free up space on my iPhone and iCloud. I’m a data hoarder and hate deleting data, but when I nearly filled my 256GB iPhone, I realized I had a problem and started aggressively deleting unnecessary data. However, photos take up most of the memory on my iPhone, which puts me in a difficult situation. I have a hard time deleting old photos, but if I don’t, I may end up paying a lot more for cloud storage to back up my data. If you’re in the same boat as me, the answer is simpler than you think. Here are some ways to delete photos and free up space on your iPhone and iCloud.
Determine what to remove
Emotional attachments and time are my biggest challenges when clearing out photo storage. I have about 18,000 objects in my photo library, including over 1,000 screenshots and an unfathomable number of similar photos. You see, when I take a photo, I usually click the shutter over a dozen times to make sure I get at least one great shot. This means that there are often unnecessary duplicates in my gallery, but it can be difficult to find them all and I don’t want to accidentally delete something important.
When I take some time to manually delete unwanted photos, I follow clear guidelines: Most screenshots and screen recordings can be saved, and I save no more than three in a series of similar snapshots. But this is a long process and sometimes emotionally draining, depending on the subject matter of my gallery. Plus, things get even more complicated if there are people in the photos I need to delete.
Fortunately, manual removal is not the only option.
Free up photo storage space on your iPhone
If you’re really short on storage space, you should focus on the simple and big accomplishments first before diving into manually browsing photos. I usually start by checking the Recently Deleted folder. There are items here that you’ve deleted in the last 30 days, and if you’re sure you won’t need them, you can delete them permanently to quickly free up space. To do this, go to the Photos app on your iPhone and scroll down until you see the Utilities section. Select Recently Deleted , click the Select button, and select the items you don’t want. Click the three dots button in the lower right corner and click Remove , then Remove from this iPhone .
Next, you should focus on quickly removing duplicate items from your photo library. Return to the previous page and click the “Duplicates” button. Click Select , then Select All , and click the Merge button at the bottom of the screen. This will open two options: merge exact copies and merge items with similar metadata. Merging exact copies is not destructive, so do it immediately to free up space. After that, take some time to look through all the photos in this list and see if you want to combine the others as well. You can merge one batch of duplicates at a time, and the process will be much faster than finding duplicates yourself, even if it’s not exactly ideal.
Once that’s done, go to your Videos and Screen Recordings folders and delete anything you don’t need. These files are usually quite large and you will see quick results by removing unnecessary items. While you’re at it, visit your Screenshots folder and get rid of the snapshots you no longer need.
Remove unwanted photos from iCloud
If you have iCloud sync enabled, the steps above will delete your photos from both your iPhone and iCloud. However, if you don’t have access to your iPhone or find it easier to organize and delete photos on your computer, you can instead visit the iCloud Photos website and delete photos from there. The interface is quite simple. The left panel lists all the albums, and the Trash button in the top right corner will help you delete photos. Once again, don’t forget to go to your Recently Deleted album and clear it out. Until you do this, you may not see a change in the amount of free space available in your iCloud account.
Using Third Party Apps to Delete iPhone Photos
I generally don’t recommend using third-party apps to clean up your photo storage because most of them don’t perform better than the built-in Photos app, often have expensive subscription models, and are made by unknown developers. Since these apps require access to your entire photo library, choosing any old app for the job is quite risky. If you really want to use one of these apps to quickly delete photos, Undolly is a good option. It quickly scans your library and uses on-device processing to identify similar photos, not just duplicates. Browsing through photos and deleting them still takes time, but the app helps you by choosing the best among similar photos, and its selection is usually pretty good. The app costs $1 per month or $15 for lifetime unlocking, which is relatively inexpensive, and the privacy label states that it does not collect any data. This is also encouraging.
Backup iPhone Photos to Cheaper Cloud Storage
For those with a large library, iCloud’s pricing tiers can be unforgiving. 50GB of iCloud storage costs $1 per month, while 200GB is a relatively low price at $3 per month. But if you go over 200GB, the next available plan is 2TB for $10 per month, more than triple the previous level. Before you consider alternatives, you should know that no other service is as convenient for backing up iPhone photos as iCloud. For all other services, you will have to keep your phone unlocked with the app running until the backup is complete. But you can save money by going elsewhere .
If you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you might want to consider Amazon Photos , which offers unlimited photo storage and 5GB of video storage at no extra cost. Even without Prime, you can subscribe to Amazon Photos for 1TB of storage for $70 per year. This plan gets you less storage per dollar than the 2TB iCloud option, but you also end up saving about $50 per year.
Personally, I prefer the Microsoft 365 subscription because it gives me access to all Office apps and 1 TB of storage for $100 per year. I have a family plan that I share with five other people and it gives me 1TB of storage per account. The family plan costs $130 per year, which works out to about $22 per person per year. iCloud and Google One also have family plans, but the storage is shared by everyone in the family. The Microsoft 365 Family plan allows each member to use 1TB, which is great.
Backup iPhone Photos to Local Drives
However, to truly protect your photos, you should also store copies of your iPhone photos on external hard drives, your Mac or PC, or a network-attached storage (NAS) device if you have one. To do this on a Mac, connect your iPhone to your computer using a USB cable and open the pre-installed Image Capture app. Now connect any external storage device and you can copy iPhone photos to this drive. On Windows, you’ll have to connect your iPhone via USB and use the Microsoft Photos app to import photos before transferring them to your external drive.
Additionally, if you are backing up photos from iPhone to a NAS device, you can use the CCC Mobile app to complete the wireless transfer. The app is free to download, but requires a one-time fee of $2.99 to back up photos and videos. You can then periodically download your entire photo library to a NAS or external storage device directly connected to your iPhone.