I recently upgraded my five-year-old iPhone, and even better than the shiny new phone itself was the fact that, finally, my storage was no longer “almost full.”
I’d been getting those dreaded notifications for almost a year without taking action. If you’re familiar with them, just know this: Buying a brand new phone isn’t your only option.
“The longer you use your smartphone, the more unnecessary files it accumulates,” said Mikita Tratseuski, product manager at the Cleaner Kit app. “All this wastes the phone’s storage resources and slows the device down. For the phone to work as well over time as it did at the beginning, you need to regularly clean its system and storage.”
That was my big mistake, one I vowed not to repeat this time. But I was also mistaken about what the major culprits were.
“People assume that their phone is full because they have too many photos or videos. Usually, that’s not the case,” said Isabelle Dervaux, a professional digital photo organizer based in New York. “People confuse their physical phone storage with their iCloud storage. If you have iCloud Photos enabled, the Photos app doesn’t take up much space. The problems are usually somewhere else.”
You can get a good idea of where by opening your smartphone’s settings and scrolling to “Storage” (under “General Settings” on an iPhone). This will show you exactly how much space you’re using, and what percentage is being used by what apps, photos, messages and more.
But you can also refer to this list of lesser-known memory-eaters and adjust your phone’s settings as needed to reclaim your space and get your phone working (almost) as good as new.
Unused apps.
Companies are always trying to get you to download an app for that, but you won’t use some of them more than once. “Remove the apps you haven’t used in a long time,” Tratseuski said.
Apple products have an Offload App option that will keep the app’s data on your phone in case you’d like to reinstall it later. Deleting an app’s cache or temporary files will also save space and can be done in Settings.
Forgotten downloads.
Music, movies and TV episodes can accumulate when you’re not paying attention. “The podcast app was my biggest problem,” Dervaux said. “Depending on your settings, you can have a lot of podcasts downloading in the background that you totally forgot you subscribed to years ago.”
She advised changing the settings to scale back on the number of podcasts you download. And occasionally, do a sweep of anything you’ve already listened to or watched and no longer need.
All those memes your friends send you.
These can take up what Dervaux calls “an outrageous amount of space” on your smartphone. If you use Instagram or WhatsApp, iPhones will automatically create folders for those images in the Photos app, with duplicate photos of everything sent to you even if you haven’t saved it. Delete these and free up lots of space.
The Messages app.
“This surprises people,” Dervaux said. “It is always bigger than we imagine.”
That’s because of attachments. “Most people never delete message threads for sentimental reasons, but even GIFs and tiny stickers add up,” she explained. Get in the habit of moving any important attachments directly to your Photos app when you receive them, and then delete them from Messages.
grinvalds via Getty Images
Your trash folders.
People forget that after they delete something, it remains in their trash folders taking up gigabytes for another 30 days. So don’t forget to empty those folders after a massive purge.
Your browser’s cache.
The cache is where your browser stores temporary files from the websites it visits. Deleting the cache (sometimes called “website data” can free up some needed space.
Duplicate and junk photos.
Hey, if you’re not taking 12-15 shots to get the one where no one has a double chin, should you even be allowed to handle a smartphone? Problem is, we often forget to go back and delete the B-sides in our photo roll.
Apple introduced a feature that lets you remove or merge duplicate photos with one click, but many people never noticed. Check the Utilities folder. It’s also a good idea to review your photos and purge extras, or photos you just took to remind yourself of that yoga pop-up class next Thursday. Your screenshots folder is probably full of them. I like to photo-purge whenever I’m waiting in a line somewhere. You can also find apps that do it for you, like Cleaner Kit.
OK, yes, your photos and videos.
These aren’t always the main culprit, but they do tend to be larger files. Make sure you’re saving them to the Cloud and one other place, like your desktop computer.
Optimizing photos keeps the original, full-resolution version in these locations and saves space on your phone. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Apps, then Photos, and select “Optimize iPhone Storage” instead of “Download and Keep Originals.” On an Android, go to Google Photos, then tap your profile picture and select “Free up space on this device.”
This doesn’t let you entirely off the hook, though, according to Dervaux. “You still have to regularly review and delete your bad, irrelevant photos, since this affects your iCloud storage.”
