How to clean up iPhone storage? Here are 8 effective methods! You will learn how to free up space by deleting messages, apps, photos, documents, and other useful tricks. Moreover, there is the best way to move photos from iCloud Photos to another cloud.
Before we go to the solutions on how to free storage space on iPhone, let’s first figure out what takes up your iPhone storage. The common ones are:
1. Photos and Videos: Photos and especially videos take up a lot of space. High-resolution images, 4K videos, and Live Photos can fill up storage quickly.
2. Apps: Some apps, especially games, use a lot of storage space. Some apps also store a lot of data and cache over time.
3. Messages: Messages, especially if they contain many images, videos, or GIFs, can take up a lot of space. These can add up over time, especially if you’re in many group chats or have
4. System and Other Storage: iOS itself, plus cached data, browser history, cookies, and other files generated by the system and apps, fall into the “System” and “Other” categories in storage. These can grow as the system and apps store more temporary data.
5. Music, Podcasts, and Downloads: Downloaded music, podcasts, and other media files take up storage. If you have a lot of downloaded content from apps like Spotify, Apple Music, or other streaming services, this could be filling your storage.
Now you know some probable reasons why your iPhone storage is full. Therefore, you can try the following 8 solutions to clear storage on iPhone, including how to check iPhone storage, enable iCloud Photo Library, optimize photos and videos, and so on.
What takes up most storage on an iPhone? You can find out the answer by checking your iPhone storage with the steps below.
Step 1. Open Settings on your iPhone.
Step 2. Choose General > iPhone Storage.
Step 3. List the apps in the Size order if you update to the latest iOS version. Then, you can see what takes up most of your storage.
Sometimes we download an app and use it for a specific purpose. But with time passing by, we may no longer need it. Therefore, the app can be removed if the iPhone storage is about to be filled up.
To offload these unused apps, you can:
Step 1. Go to Settings on your iPhone.
Step 2. Choose General > iPhone Storage.
Step 3. Browse the app list, open the one you do not need, and click the Offload App button. Offloading an app will not delete its data. So, when you reinstall this app again, you will find your data are still there without losing them.
Photos and videos, especially high-resolution ones, can quickly occupy large storage space on your iPhone. Therefore, when you do not have enough storage, consider optimizing them. You can clear your Recently Deleted folder, delete the duplicate photos, and delete the unwanted large videos to free up space.
Web browser cache can be easily ignored when you try to free storage space on iPhone. If you often use the web browser, it will leave much browsing history and website data on your device and take up your space. You can clear Safari cache by opening Settings > Apps > Safari > Clear History and Website Data > Clear History.
You may also be used to saving files on your device and some of them may be large. In this regard, you can delete some files that are useless.
Step 1. Open the Files app on your iPhone.
Step 2. Choose the Browse tab and select On My iPhone.
Step 3. Look through the documents, long-press on the unnecessary one, and choose Delete. Step 4. Back to Browse, open Recently Deleted, long-press on it, and click Delete Now to permanently remove the file from your iPhone.
You may download a number of songs on your iPhone in case you want to listen to music when there is no network connection. These songs can also occupy your iPhone storage. Due to this reason, deleting some unwanted songs when your iPhone is running out of storage is a good idea.
If you use Apple Music, you can quickly delete all downloaded songs by the following steps.
Step 1. Open Settings on your iPhone and choose Music.
Step 2. Select Downloaded Music and click Edit in the upper-right corner.
Step 3. Tap the red minus icon beside All Songs and confirm to Delete to remove all the downloads from your iPhone.
Apart from the attachment of messages, you can also delete some old messages to create more storage for your iPhone. To automatically delete old messages, you can:
Step 1. Open Settings on your iPhone and choose Apps at the bottom of this page.
Step 2. Select Messages in the app list and navigate to Keep Messages.
Step 3. Change Forever to 30 Days or 1 Year. Then, messages kept over 30 days or 1 year will be permanently removed from your iPhone.
When you find your iPhone storage is full, you can consider using iCloud storage instead of iPhone storage. After upgrading your iCloud plan, you can get 50GB to 12TB storage for file storage. If you have a lot of photos on your iPhone, you can enable iCloud Photo Library to save the full-resolution photos.
Step 1. Open Settings and click on your profile.
Step 2. Choose iCloud and select Photos.
Step 3. Switch on the button next to Sync this iPhone and choose Optimize iPhone Storage below. Then, photos in full-resolution versions will be kept on iCloud and replaced by smaller versions on iPhone.
If you use iCloud Photos to save photos instead of local storage but find it full, you can choose upgrade your plan again or move some photos to other cloud drives, such as Google Photos, Flickr, OneDrive, etc. To easily transfer photos between clouds, MultCloud plays a role. It is a free cloud file transfer service and can help you migrate photos without downloading and uploading. Besides, it can automatically delete the transferred photos in iCloud Photos after the task is done.
Here is a simple example of how to transfer iCloud Photos to Google Photos.
Step 1. Enter the MultCloud website and create an account.
Step 2. Add iCloud Photos by clicking Add Cloud and the iCloud Photos logo. Then, go through the two-factor authentication and grant MultCloud access permission.
Step 3. Add Google Photos with similar operations in Step 2 without two-factor authentication.
Step 4. Select Cloud Transfer in the left sidebar and choose photos in iCloud Photos as the source and a Google Photos folder as the destination. Then, click Transfer Now to start the task.
Note: If you want the task to auto-delete the transferred photos, open Options and check the box next to Delete all source files after transfer is complete.
There are 8 quick solutions on how to free storage space on iPhone. You can choose your preferred solutions or try them one by one to gain some spare storage. Besides, if your iCloud is also about to be full, you can automatically move photos from iCloud Photos to Dropbox, OneDrive, or another cloud storage via MultCloud.