iPhones are not without faults! The single most common complaint is that these phones have limited storage space. If you can’t afford the 128 or 256gb options, you’re stuck with 64gb for life. This can be enough for some, but when you use your phone a lot it soon proves to be less storage than you realised. Android phone users don’t really have storage issues as most manufacturers of Android devices let you expand them with memory cards. You can’t do this with an iPhone, so you have to get a bit more creative when freeing up the internal storage space.
Thankfully, you can follow some quick and easy steps to deal with iPhone storage woes:
See what takes up most of your storage
First things first, head to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and you’ll be met with a breakdown of your phone usage. Essentially, this lists all your apps and shows you what’s taking up the most storage space. It’s a great feature as it will also provide you with some tips to get rid of a lot of potentially useless data. This includes deleting old conversations, reviewing large attachments from messages, and deleting old videos that you downloaded. Follow some of the tips provided on the screen to get rid of many megabytes of data.
Delete old apps
While you’re on the iPhone storage screen, scroll through all of the apps you have downloaded. It will surprise you how many there are, and your apps usually take up the majority of your storage space. So, it makes sense to get rid of ones that take up storage but never get used. My advice is to look through the essential apps you use every day, and ones that you need but might not use daily. Keep all of them, but delete everything else. I know for a fact you have apps on your phone that never see any use, yet you haven’t deleted them. iPhones are helpful in that they tell you when you last used an app, which helps you realise if you really need it on your phone or not. Go on an app purge to free up a fair few gigabytes of storage space. You can even delete these apps permanently from your icloud backup.
Store photos in the cloud
The last step is to address your large photo folder. If you’ve had your phone for a while, it will most likely have many gigabytes of photos/videos stored on it. You can free up loads of space by storing the photos in the cloud, rather than on your device. Apple has its own cloud, but you have to pay to get decent storage. Instead, as it shows here https://backlightblog.com/google-photos-privacy/, Google Photos provides free storage and is very secure. Upload photos to the cloud, then delete them from your device. This is particularly clever when dealing with old photos that you don’t want to get rid of, but don’t need on your device all the time. Also, consider downloading an app that helps you remove duplicate photos from your library. You’ll be amazed at how much storage is taken up by your multiple selfies!
These three tips are genuinely all you need to free up a tonne of iPhone storage! The benefit of doing this is that it speeds up your phone and also prevents the need to go out and buy a new one with more storage.
