Need to Kill Some Time? Here Are 6 Easy Ways to Free Up Storage Space on Your iPhone
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When everything about your iPhone works normally, it becomes an extension of yourself. But the second you try to download an app, only to be met with the dreaded “iPhone Storage Full” pop-up, panic can start to set in. Before you go on a full-on deleting spree, here's how to free up storage space on your iPhone without regretting your decisions later.
The first step is to see what exactly is taking up all the space on your iPhone. Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, and you'll see a color-coded indicator bar at the top of the screen. This shows you at a glance how much space your apps, photos, messages, and other media are occupying. Beneath this bar are all your apps, listed in descending order from the biggest space hog to the smallest.
Here's how to free up space on your iPhone before it becomes something you have to do.
Move photos and videos to external storage
There's a good chance that your Photos app is at the very top of the storage-usage list. One effective, if painstaking approach to freeing up iPhone storage is simply going through the Photos app and deleting old pictures and videos that you're sure you won't miss.
Alternatively, you can move all your photos and videos to an external storage location, which allows you to delete the locally stored media and start fresh if you so choose. You can sign up for a digital, cloud-based service (such as Dropbox, Google Photos, or Microsoft OneDrive) and export your photos there. Just keep in mind that while it may be free to sign up for and use these services initially, you may need to upgrade to a paid subscription if your amount of media exceeds their free-tier limitations.
If you want to keep your media offline, you could also connect to an external hard drive via USB-to-Lightning cable and export your media that way.
Enable iCloud for photos
Apple devices frequently prompt users to enable iCloud for the best experience — the reason it does this is because iCloud allows you to access your data from all your Apple devices. It's how you can sync the photos from your iPhone to your iPad, for example.
Another feature is that enabling iCloud will automatically keep the high-resolution version of your photos and videos in cloud storage until you want to download them, while the low-res (and also low-storage) versions are stored locally on the device, saving you a bit of space.
To enable iCloud, tap Settings > Your Apple ID Name > iCloud Drive, then toggle on Sync This iPhone.
Note that while iCloud is a type of cloud storage service, it will not recover photos that have been deleted from your device — in other words, when you delete a picture on your iPhone, you also delete it from iCloud.
Delete or offload apps you don't use
Once you've scanned the list of apps on your iPhone that are taking up the most space, you may notice a few lesser-used apps that you can part with right away. Tap on an app you'd like to remove and either select “Delete app” or “Offload app.”
Deleting the app will remove the app's storage and data from your phone. Offloading the app, however, frees up storage space but retains the data, so you won't lose all your information in case you want to redownload it again.
If you have a habit of downloading apps only to use them once and never again, you can set your iPhone to automatically offload unused apps for you. To enable this, go to Settings > App Store, then toggle on Offload Unused Apps.
Set up auto-delete for your messages
Depending on how sentimental you are or often you scroll back in your text history, you may want to consider auto-deleting your Messages since a years-long backlog could be taking up more iPhone memory than necessary (especially if there are lots of videos, photos, and GIFs shared between you and your group chat).
To set this up, go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages, then choose the length of time you want to keep all your messages going forward. The default is set to “Forever,” but you can change it to “30 days” or “1 year” — any messages older than that length of time will be automatically deleted.
Streamline your downloads
You may notice a significant portion of the iPhone Storage indicator bar taken up by downloaded media such as music, movies, podcasts, e-books, and audiobooks. The good news is that you can make changes from your Settings without having to open each app and remove downloads manually.
Tap on each of the corresponding apps in your iPhone Storage list to review whether or not you need all of that media downloaded. Underneath the “Delete app” and “Offload app” options for these apps, you should see the downloaded media that's on your device, along with an icon to delete next to each one.
Clear your browsing history
Finally, if you can't remember the last time you cleared your smartphone browsers, now is a good time to do that — it's a quick and easy way to help free up a bit of memory.
To clear your Safari history, go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data, then choose the timeframe to wipe: last hour, today, today and yesterday, or all history.
To clear your Google Chrome history, open the app, tap the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and choose “Clear Browsing Data.” You'll be able to select or deselect whether to clear your browsing history, cookies, site data, cached images and files, autofill data, or saved passwords. Then, tap “Clear Browsing Data” at the bottom of the screen.
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