How To Save Space On Your iPhone
While iPhones and most technology is developing every day, not all features are keeping up with our needs, for example the limited storage space. Whether you use your smartphone for photography, apps, music or just calls, when it comes to storage space, you’re likely to have hit a breaking point at least once in your life. There are many ways to get hold of more available storage on your phone, such as buying a higher spec iPhone with more memory, but this is quite an expensive option, and nobody wants to pay more money by buying a phone just for extra storage.
There’s nothing worse than when the “no storage available” message comes up, especially when it decides to do it just as you’re about to take a picture. The first thing you think of is having to delete all your favourite pictures, or your favourite songs from your music playlist.
You may not know it but there are many other ways to inch back some space on your iPhone without deleting the things that are important to you. Being ruthless with deleting files on your iPhone will always help, but there are several tips you can take up before you get to that stage. Here are some suggestions for a quick phone clean up.
Delete what’s taking up the most space
The first step is finding out what exactly is taking up the most space. Go to settings > storage > iCloud usage > manage storage, here you should be able to see a list, of every app in order and just how much space they are taking.
If you click on a specific app you will be shown two pieces of key information.
1: The amount of space used by the app
2: The amount of space used by the apps documents and data.
For example, if you were looking at your photos and camera app, it will tell you how much the app itself is taking and the amount the photos are taking.
You should be able to use this information in the storage usage section to guide you through your iPhone. Think about what apps you prioritise and what apps you haven’t used recently. For example, if an app you downloaded last summer is taking a lot of space and you haven’t used it in over a month, its probably not important to you, so think do you really need it? If you do delete it, remember you can re download it again whenever you like.
Delete Apps you have only used once
When you have looked through all the apps, there will be at least one app that you forgot was even on your phone and you probably haven’t used it since you first downloaded it. So be brutal and just delete it. By deleting a few apps, you can free up to 500MB.
Even if it’s an app you’ve paid for, your details will have been saved, so you can still download them at any time, free of charge.
Back up your most important photos
While photos and videos on your gallery may hold a lot of meaning for you, the reality is they do take up far more space than you realise. You shouldn’t delete these forever, however it is a good idea to back these up so that they are available to download at any time.You can use Google Photos, or iCloud to back up images and videos rather than storing your entire photo and video history on your device. Another option is to make a Drobox account linked up to your iPhone – as this allows you to back up your files directly from your phone, rather than connecting it to a laptop or desktop.
Don’t keep your double saved photos
If you don’t want to back up your photos and videos to somewhere like Dropbox, then I would recommend going through your gallery and deleting photos/videos that may have been duplicated, for example if someone has sent you a photo multiple times. Photos and videos that you don’t need anymore can be deleted, for example when you screenshotted a pair of shoes you wanted, and you bought them, you no longer need the screenshot right? Deleting photos, you don’t want, or need is one of the easiest ways to free space as photos can hold the most storage and you’re not losing anything by deleting them.
Stop storing text messages
Deleting conversations such as text messages or WhatsApp messages is a very good way to up your storage. When you take time to look you realise how many messages are on your phone. If you have conversations from over two months ago, or if you sent a lot of images on a text, then it will be hogging a lot of space. For example, you text your boyfriend all day every day on WhatsApp, you’re going to have a chat that starts from a few months ago and is still present, chances are you don’t need those 400 messages, or the photos either as they are already on your gallery, so deleting your conversations is a good option.
If you want to stop your phone saving texts automatically you can now go to your settings and change the amount of days your phone keeps them. To do this open your settings > messages > message history > keep messages. Here you can change “forever” to 30 days or 1 year.
Deleting old playlists
All of those songs you start to download soon add up, and unfortunately music takes up a lot of space. So, deleting songs that you don’t listen to anymore, or even playlists that you made a long time ago can help you earn back your storage space.
If you store music on the apple music app then deleting individual songs is a very easy job for you, go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage and find Apple Music on the list. You can swipe to delete individual songs, or you can swipe on All Songs at the top to delete all.
However, if you use a different app such as Spotify then it can be slightly harder as you will have to open the app directly to delete songs.
How we help
Don’t forget here at Smart-Sure we offer iPhone insurance! We use trusted engineers in many locations, meaning when you need help you are closer than you think to a helping hand.
Contact us via our website or call us on 03333 449 669 if you would like to find out more, our customer service team will be happy to help with any questions or queries.