How To Free Up Space on Your iPhone
The amount of space you have on your iPhone determines what you can do with it. If you don’t have room on your iPhone, there are games, apps, and even streaming services you may not be able to use. And with full phone storage, you can forget about taking photos and videos.
Fortunately, freeing up extra space on your iPhone is fairly straightforward with the right tips and tricks. Regularly creating space on your iPhone is a good idea, instead of waiting until you get the dreaded “low storage” message to figure out where to put all your data. From space audits, to deleting unused apps, and even finding useless duplicate media, there are tons of tricks out there to help you free up space on your iPhone. Read on to find some more.
Storage Space Audit
When you first buy and set up your iPhone, you have between 32 and 128 GB of storage space. However, as you progress, you’ll find that space declines consistently, and quickly. If you want to manage your space, you need to first know precisely where it’s going.
How do you find out what consumes space on your phone? First, go to your phone’s Settings, tap on General > iPhone Storage. It will draw up a list of apps on your phone in order of storage used from most to least. Typically, Music, Videos, Photos, and other media apps top this list, especially if you make 4k videos or download entire seasons of Netflix shows for offline viewing.
Note that you will see the “App Size” and “Documents and Data” sizes when you look at each app storage summary. This detail lets you see if the app is large or the documents within the app. When you know this, you can decide whether to remove the files or uninstall the app.
You can also view your iPhone’s storage summary by connecting it to your MacBook computer. Once connected, open Finder to view your phone’s summary.
Back Up or Delete Duplicate Photos and Video Footage
One of the iPhone’s best features is its camera. If you’ve had an iPhone for a while, you probably have many duplicate pictures and video footage taking up space. However, you can move all that footage to iCloud so that you can keep it while reducing its impact on your phone’s storage.
To backup your media footage to iCloud, navigate to your phone’s Settings, open your account, and then tap iCloud > Photos. Next, activate the iCloud Photos option, then select 'Optimize iPhone Storage.' By choosing this option, you can upload high-res versions of footage to the cloud and maintain low-res versions on your device.
With your iPhone’s storage automatically optimized, you can leave better versions of your pictures online and download them when necessary. The lower-res versions can stay on your phone, so you always have access to them - instead of having to delete them.
Of course, backing up photographs and videos to your iCloud account also requires space and payment. If iCloud’s pricing is steep, other third-party cloud storage providers like Google Photos or Dropbox exist. You can move your photos to these provider’s servers and then delete them from your iPhone, saving you more room and money.
Remove Music, Videos, and Other Media
When you’re in a pinch for space, the most straightforward files to delete are those you can quickly get back later. If you have large media files like music playlists, audio books, or podcast episodes, these are low-hanging fruit for space relief. You can quickly delete them and get them back another time. With iPhones, there may be music, videos, and photos stored in Apple-native apps, which you cannot delete. However, you can make space by clearing their files. To do so, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage.
Choose an app that you want to delete files from, and it will display all the shows you have downloaded episodes for, along with their file sizes. You can then swipe left on an episode to show and select the delete button.
Another option for managing media files on your iPhone is to sync your phone to your computer. You can quickly move music files from your computer to your phone en masse and remove them just as easily by syncing.
To get rid of heavy files on third-party apps, you will have to open them individually and delete the downloaded files. If you have a streaming app, check to see if it has high data storage numbers; you may have videos that you downloaded and never removed.
Uninstall or Offload Apps You No Longer Need
Almost everyone has one or two apps they installed but seldom use. These apps take up space. Scan through your iPhone for apps that you seldom use and delete such apps.
You can open the app drawer by swiping right to your last home screen. To delete a group of apps simultaneously, press and hold a space on your home screen. Your apps (or group of apps) will start to shake about, and each icon will have a minus symbol next to it.
Tap that symbol, and then tap the “Delete App” option that pops up.
You might feel like it’s too risky or permanent to delete an app. Perhaps you installed a favorite game and didn’t want to lose your progress by deleting the data. You could also have a design app with old project files that you’d like to keep.
If that’s the case, then you can simply offload the app. When you offload an app, you uninstall it, but leave the Documents and Data until you’re ready to reinstall the app. To offload an app, go to your iPhone’s Settings > General > iPhone Storage and choose the app you wish to offload. Next, tap the app and select the option to 'Offload App.’
You can also mandate your phone to offload apps whenever you start to lose space automatically. To set auto offloading, go to your iPhone’s Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Look next to Recommendations and tap ‘Show All.’ This will bring up the option to 'Offload Unused Apps' by default. Hit “Enable,” and your phone will offload unused apps without calling your attention.
A downside to selecting auto offloading is that Apple chooses which apps to offload on your behalf. This means that your phone may uninstall some useful apps while deleting useless ones.
Delete Old Conversations
It’s pretty easy to think that text-based conversations do not consume a lot of space. However, the truth is that they can quickly take up space - especially if you receive lots of media in your conversations.
Your phone stores these conversations so you can quickly swipe up and retrieve them. If you need to make space on your iPhone, you can do this by looking through your old conversations and deleting as many as you can.
You can browse through your iMessage and delete individual text messages or complete threads that you no longer need. For instance, those texts that your bank sends when you receive a new payment - do you need them all? What about the text messages your carrier sends to tell you about new data plans?
These text messages pile up and take unnecessary space. Get rid of them quickly.
Clean Out Your Redundant Notes
Just like text messages, notes take up space when there are a lot of them. However, unlike other apps, the iPhone’s Notes app does not show up when you look through the Storage Usage list.
Deleting notes that you no longer use is one of the least impactful ways to release storage space - because they don’t take that much. However, tiny drops make a mighty ocean, and when combined with other space-making endeavors, it can be instrumental.
Disable Photo Streaming
If you have an iPhone, iPad, and a MacBook computer, you might want to activate photo streaming. Photo streaming syncs your devices so that you can take a picture on one and have it available on all. Typically, this feature is helpful if you’re a producer on a clock. However, if you’re dealing with space problems, photo streaming can be a considerable challenge.
Perform A Factory Reset on Your iPhone
All the tips above show you how to free up space on your iPhone by deleting individual apps and files. However, if you prefer to take a more drastic option, you can perform a factory reset on your device and then add your desired files and apps.
While carrying out a factory reset is a simple process, it isn’t something to do without proper preparation. First, make sure you back up your iPhone properly so as not to lose any important files or settings. Then, after performing the reset, you need to make sure that you restore your device without re-adding the junk that took up space initially.
Performing a factory reset should be a last resort unless you planned to delete most of the files on your device. If that is not your plan, use a combination of the earlier mentioned tips to free space on your iPhone.
Conclusion
Our iPhones can get congested if we consume content without freeing up space for optimal performance. Luckily, there are many ways to free up space on your iPhone, like removing media, uninstalling apps, and performing a storage backup. Finally, if deleting media and miscellaneous files does not fix the problem, you can perform a factory reset and add the apps you want.
