How do i clean my iphone storage

Q: How do I free up storage on my iPhone?

Open your iPhones Settings menu, tap General and go to iPhone Storage. Youll see a list of your apps along with how much space each app occupies and the last time you used it. Scroll through the list and try deleting apps that you havent used in a long time. Get rid of apps you havent used in a long time.

Is your iPhone running out of storage space? Many things could be taking up valuable real estate from pictures, videos, and streaming downloads. Tap or click here to find out how to clean up your contacts for good.

Table of Contents Show

Common ways to reduce what’s on your Other list
1. Clear your Safari caches
Tech news that matters to you, daily
2. Change the Messages settings
3. Offload apps
4. Clever app trick
What does “iPhone Storage Almost Full” mean?
How to check storage on iPhone
Here are the steps on how to check storage on iPhone:
My iPhone says that storage is full, but it’s not. How to fix it?
Tips on how to get more storage on iPhone
Switch off Photo Stream
Check additional folders in your Albums
Delete similar photos
Delete large videos
How do I free up storage on my iPhone?
How do I clear my iPhone storage without deleting everything?
What do I do when my iPhone memory is full?

However, there are occasions when it isn’t apparent why you’re running out of space on your iPhone. These storage issues could be from the little-known Other categories.

Other relatively large and diverse categories are difficult for most to pinpoint or describe. They mainly consist of system caches, logs, Siri voices and updates. Regardless, there are many ways that you can keep them from clogging up too much space on your phone.

Common ways to reduce what’s on your Other list

1. Clear your Safari caches

Though there’s no proper way to eliminate the Other data completely, you can at least attempt to lessen its amount. One way to free space is by clearing the cache on your Safari browser. Here’s how:

Open Settings.
Click Safari.
Click Clear History and Website Data.
Click Clear History and Website Data again to confirm.

This works because data is automatically stored on your phone associated with a site whenever you open a new webpage. Clear the cache means to clear the data, which frees up space.

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2. Change the Messages settings

The Messages app is automatically set to keep your texts for an indefinite amount of time. While this might sound effective at first glance, texts can take up tons of space. Fortunately, there is a way for you to clear up the space for this. Here’s how:

Open Settings.
Select Messages.
Under the Message History section, click Keep Messages.
Choose how long you want to keep messages. You can pick 30 Days, 1 Year or Forever. Select 30 Days to free up space more frequently.

3. Offload apps

Offloading an app means that you choose to keep the app’s data even after the app is deleted from your phone. You can do this if you change your mind and want to return to the app later.

For example, you can delete Google Maps (since it takes up tons of space) but still keep the data from that app. Here’s how to offload apps:

Open Settings.
Select General.
Click iPhone Storage.
Scroll down to the app section and select an app to offload. Click the app and select Offload App.
Click Offload App again to confirm.

4. Clever app trick

If you don’t want to delete an app permanently, you can still cut down on the storage space it takes. For example, the Facebook app stores tons of data. From photos to videos and everything else on your timeline, Facebook eats up lots of space.

Deleting the Facebook app is a clever way to get back valuable real estate. Then, reinstall the app and sign in to your account. The app will look and function as it always did, but it will have a fresh start and won’t take up all that space. You can do this with any app on your iPhone. Here’s how to delete an app:

Touch and hold the app you want to delete.
Tap Remove App.
Tap Delete App, then tap Delete to confirm.

NOTE: Some built-in Apple apps can’t be deleted from your device, so you might not see the option to delete an app.

Each new iPhone comes with a better camera that is capable of taking even better photos. Does this mean that each pic will require more space on your iPhone storage? The answer is unfortunately Yes. Even if 256 GB or 512 GB of phone storage might seem to be enough, the “iPhone Storage Almost Full” notification might appear suddenly and maybe at the most inconvenient moment. In this article you will learn what to do when the iPhone is out of storage and how to get more free space for your new beautiful photos.

Contents:

What does “iPhone storage is full” mean?
How to check storage on an iPhone.
My iPhone says that storage is full, but it’s not. How to fix it?
Tips on how to get more storage on an iPhone.

What does “iPhone Storage Almost Full” mean?

The biggest thing that usually takes up iPhone storage are photos. The message “Storage Almost Full” appears on the iPhone screen when its memory is so low that you can’t even take more photos and videos. Also, when the storage is full, it might lead to the iPhone freezing. That’s why you should keep enough free space on your iPhone storage to prevent iOS freezing and seeing those annoying messages about low free space.

How to check storage on iPhone

You shouldn’t wait for the message when your iPhone memory is full. We recommend that you regularly check your storage, analyze what is taking your iPhone storage space and regularly clean up your iPhone from unneeded digital stuff.

Here are the steps on how to check storage on iPhone:

Open Settings on iPhone.
Go to the General section → select iPhone Storage.
You will see a bar chart of what is taking space on your iPhone and the volume of used space of your storage.

Also, on this screen, you can see how much space each application takes on your iPhone. If you scroll down, you will see the volume of System and Other files on your iPhone.

In this article, we will share the tips and tricks on how to clean up the storage and make more space available on your iPhone.

My iPhone says that storage is full, but it’s not. How to fix it?

Some users claim that they get a notification that iPhone storage is almost full while, in fact, it isn’t and they have free storage. In this case, we recommend that you try one or more of the following tips to fix the issue:

Clean up applications’ cache files. For this you will need to reinstall applications or use third-party cache cleaners for the iPhone.
Reset iPhone. For this, go to Settings → General → Reset → Reset All Settings. Note, the setting will be reset to the default state.
Restore iPhone backup. If you regularly do backups of your iPhone, you can try to restore the latest backup. However, make sure that you will not lose any important data on your iPhone beforehand.

Tips on how to get more storage on iPhone

Let’s look at Photos settings in detail and see what we can do to make more free space on your iPhone.

Switch off Photo Stream

If Photo Stream is switched on, all photos are stored on your iPhone twice: the photo itself and an icon of each photo from iCloud. Simply turning off the slider to the “Upload to My Photo Stream” you will save a third of the storage occupied by your pics.

Here is how to switch off Photo Stream:

Open Setting on iPhone.
Scroll down, find Photos and tap on it.
Switch off the option My Photo Stream.

Use iCloud

When iCloud is switched on, your photos and videos will automatically be uploaded to iCloud once you connected to Wi-Fi. The iCloud Library saves your photos and videos and allows you to save picture previews on your iPhone, while the full-size media is kept in iCloud. Keeping your photos in iCloud will free up space on your iPhone. By default, you have 5GB of free space in iCloud. For more iCloud storage space you will have to pay. The prices start from $0.99 per month for 50 GB.

Here is how to enable iCloud on your iPhone:

Open Setting on your iPhone.
Go to General and tap on iPhone Storage.
Tap on Enable next to the iCloud Photos option and confirm the action.

Check additional folders in your Albums

Instagram, Snapseed and other programs create additional folders on your iPhone. In those folders you will find edited duplicates of your photos. Also, if you regularly take screenshots, most likely you have many old and unneeded screenshots. Take a look at these folders and remove media files you no longer need.

Delete similar photos

Despite having duplicate photos and unneeded screenshots, most likely you will have tons of useless similar photos. When you take burst photos, when you take several pics to choose the best shot, when you are inspired by a landscape and take dozens of photos and in most cases, you make many pics and then forget about them. Fortunately, there is a quick way to find and remove similar pictures from your iPhone. You can use a free application from Nektony called Phone Cleaner for Media Files. This application scans your iPhone Media library and shows you groups of similar photos. You can easily select the best shot in each group and remove all other copies.

Here is how to use Phone Cleaner to remove similar photos from iPhone:

Download and launch Phone Cleaner for Media files on your iPhone.
Launch the application and grant access to your Photo Library.
The application will scan your photos and show groups of similar photos.
In each group tap on the Like icon on the photo that you like most. Other photos from the group will be moved to the Trash section.
Go to the Trash section and tap on Remove Selected.
Don’t forget to empty the Trash of your iPhone, as the application puts all removed photos into a temporary folder also known “Recently Deleted”.

Delete large videos

Videos take up even more space than photos. You can go right to the Videos album in your Photos app or use Phone Cleaner for Media Files again. Despite finding similar photos, the application finds the biggest video files and displays them in descending order of size. This is more convenient than searching for the biggest videos manually.

How to use Phone Cleaner to find and remove the biggest videos from iPhone:

Launch Phone Cleaner for Media Files.
Go to the Biggest section.
Swipe right or left to see the biggest videos.
Swipe down to remove unneeded large videos.
Go to the Trash section and tap on Remove Selected.
Empty the Recently Deleted album in your Photos, as the application puts all removed videos there.

If even after these short tips your iPhone storage is still full, learn more tips on how to clear iPhone or iPad. However we recommend that you first download Phone Cleaner and check how many unneeded media files you have on your iPhone.

How do I free up storage on my iPhone?

Open your iPhone's Settings menu, tap General and go to iPhone Storage. You'll see a list of your apps along with how much space each app occupies and the last time you used it. Scroll through the list and try deleting apps that you haven't used in a long time. Get rid of apps you haven't used in a long time.