Free up Your iPhone Storage with These Tips

Need to clear some storage on your phone? Can't take a photo, or install the app you want? Follow these easy-to-follow space-saving tips for iPhone and iPad owners.

Running out of storage space is a reality for many iPhone users: whether it's apps, music, messages or (most often) photos and videos, most people run out of space at critical moments. Maybe when you're trying to update your operating system, or when you're trying to take a photo of an important occasion.

Unfortunately, you can't upgrade your iPhone's internal storage. But don't worry:Assistance is at hand. In this article, we'll share top tips for managing and optimizing your iPhone's available storage to make the most of every last megabyte and make room for new apps and photos.

Also note that even if you can't upgrade your internal storage, you can still supplement your iPhone's capacity with external storage accessories, and you can use iCloud storage to expand your capacity to 2TB; it's also worth reading our extensive advice on how to increase iPhone storage space in a variety of ways.

1. Find out what is taking up space and delete the biggest culprits

The first thing you'll want to do is figure out what's taking up space on your iPhone. Luckily, there's an easy way to do this.

1.Open Settings and select General.

2.Click on iPhone Storage.

3.This will take you to a screen where you can see what is taking up space on your iPhone. There will be a bar graph divided into photos, apps, system data, and other types of files. Older versions of the iPhone operating system also show the mysterious Other storage, which can often be tens of gigabytes, which leaves many people wondering how to delete Other storage on their iPhone.

4.There are various storage management options that we will come back to, but if you scroll down, you will see which apps take up the most space.

2. Delete apps from the Home screen

There is another way to delete apps that might be slightly quicker if you just want to free up some space in a hurry. You can delete an app from the Home screen.

How this works depends on the version of iOS you are using.

1.In the most recent iOS versions, press and hold on an icon until the menu comes up.

2.Then press Remove App.

3.You’ll then see a window pop up to confirm you want to delete the app.

4.Choose Delete App to remove it from your iPhone.

3. Delete app data and cache

To look deeper into the storage being taken up by apps, return to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and click on the arrow beside one of the apps listed there. This way you can see how much data is used by the app itself, and how much additional space is being used by documents and data.

4. Turn off Photo Stream

If you’ve got Photo Stream turned on you will see photos you have taken on your iPhone or iPad, and those you have uploaded to your Mac from your camera. These images aren’t full resolution, but are still likely to take up a lot of space on your iPhone. If you could really do with that extra space then turn off Photo Stream.

Go to Settings > Photos (or Photos & Camera in older versions of iOS) and deselect My Photo Stream. This will delete your Photo Stream from your iPhone.

Unfortunately, it also means that your iPhone photos are no longer uploaded to your Photo Stream on your other devices. You can always turn it back on again after the storage issue has passed.

5. Record video at a lower resolution

The newer iphones can reduce the quality of the videos you record.

As the screenshot shows, if you record a minute of video in 4K, it could take up 400MB on the iPhone, so you probably don't want to do that.

The iPhone should default to 1080p HD at 60fps, but you can save further by going to 720p HD and 30fps: only 40MB a minute instead of 90MB.

You can change this in Settings > Camera > Record Video.

6. Get enough space for a photograph

Suppose you suddenly have a great photo opportunity, but the camera app says there isn't enough room to take more photos, and you don't have time to bother deleting things.

However, if you open another camera app (e.g. ProCamera), you might be able to take a few photos that you otherwise wouldn't be able to. This is because different apps have access to different parts of your phone's storage/memory. Try it out, who knows.