Phone Storage Full? Here are 5 Tricks to Free Up Space
Is your phone storage full? Ever experienced the ‘low on storage’ window popping up now and then? It’s pretty standard for every smartphone user to run out of space unless you can afford one with 1TB of storage space. Even then, months of doggo and cat photos or videos will eventually take up a massive chunk of space.
So, skip the head-cracking and brain-storming step, and learn these 5 tricks for when your phone storage is full.
1. What Occupies the Biggest Chunk in Your Storage?
The first step is to check your storage for whatever’s occupying the most space.
For iPhone users:
- Go to Settings
- Click on General
- Tap on iPhone Storage
For Android users:
- Go to Settings
- Tap on Battery and device care
- Then tap on Storage
Once there, you should be able to see an overview of what’s taking up the most storage on your phone. You can then decide which files, videos, images, or apps to remove or back-up from your device.
2. Say Goodbye to Your Least Used Apps
It’s time to review your collection of apps and delete the rarely used ones. iPhone users can set up their iPhones to delete unused apps automatically. Meanwhile, Android users must do it manually.
For iPhone users:
- Go to Settings
- Click on General
- Tap on iPhone Storage
- Enable Offload Unused Apps
Once you enable the Offload Unused Apps feature, your iPhone will automatically delete these apps when storage space is running low.
For Android users:
- Open Play Store
- Click on your circular profile icon at the top right corner
- Tap Manage apps and device
- Tap on the Manage tab
- Click on the icon with three lines
- Sort the sequence to Least used
This list of unused or rarely used apps can make it easier for you to decide which app to delete.
3. Time to Delete Downloaded Movies, TV Series, and Songs
Movies and and music files can take up a large space in your storage without you knowing it. Music files in particular are usually really small, so we tend to neglect them.
However, if accumulated over time, the hundred (or even thousands) of music files will eat into a large chunk of storage space.
Apps like Spotify permits users to download songs for offline listening, so if you’re a frequent user of that feature, you might want to remove songs which you hardly listen to.
The same goes for Netflix or Youtube Premium, where movies and series can be downloaded for offline viewing. Depending on the duration of the movie, these files can take up more than 1GB of space so it might do you good to do some spring cleaning.
You can toggle the auto/smart download option in the settings to also prevent movies or shows from being automatically downloaded onto your device. Downloaded movies and shows are also valid from 48hours to 30days depending on the licensing agreement.
4. Cleanse Your WhatsApp Storage
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps. If you’re unfamiliar with the app, you wouldn’t know that you can set up this app to not automatically download every image and video, leaving you with a bulk of unwanted files.
By doing this, you can gatekeep the image or videos that are worth downloading, and ignore the ones which will contribute to spam.
For iPhone users:
- Open the Settings app
- Tap on Chats
- Disable Save to Camera Roll
For Android users:
- Click the icon with three dots in the top right corner
- Tap on Settings
- Click on Storage and data
- Under the Media auto-download section, un-check all the options available
You can also identify which files occupy storage on the Storage and data page. Simply tap on Manage storage, and you’ll have a breakdown of all the media files received via WhatsApp together with the file size.
You can then begin to review and delete unwanted files.
5. Detox Your Gallery
Clearing your gallery is the fail-safe method. It may be time-consuming, but it’s been proven to be effective time and time again. Here’s a reminder on how to efficiently do it.
If you want to delete specific images or files from a particular app, you can first check if your gallery app automatically categorises them. You can directly delete pictures or videos from that specific album if it does. Hence, you won’t have to scroll through your entire camera roll tediously.
One quick option to keep them is to back it up your , on a physical disk or on cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Photos and iCloud for iOS users. Cloud storage usually comes with a free tier with a downsizing in photo quality to ensure optimal storage. You can check out external SSD drive options and sellers on our website!
Phone Storage Full No More
With these 5 tricks, we hope the ‘phone storage full’ window won’t be bothering you anymore! To avoid spending hours every time you cleanse your smartphone storage, try to make this into a routine and regularly delete unnecessary files.
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