The second most common complaint that I hear from iPhone users, is that they’re running low
on space. Perhaps you’ve had your phone for a while now, you don’t want to upgrade just yet,
but you really need to free up a bit of your iphone’s internal storage. Your iphone is
actually pretty capable at doing this for itself, but that said, if you’re really running low,
there are definitely some things you can do. So, in this video, I’ll show you how to identify how
much space you’re currently using, what you’re using it on, and share some real methods for
freeing up some of that valuable internal storage. OK, let’s get into it.
First things first, you’re going to want to establish how much storage you’re currently
using, how much you have available to you, and get a breakdown of what the
used storage comprises of. To do this, we’re going to head into Settings, then
choose General, and then choose iPhone Storage. This is the main information that we’re interested
in, up at the top, where your phone will do some calculations, before giving you a breakdown of
all the information that we need. Now, I do just want to point out, because if I don’t,
someone will mention it in the comments, yes I’m aware that I’ve got loads of space on this phone,
so if your phone looks like this, good news, you don’t have a storage problem, I’m using my phone
purely for illustrative purposes, and the method for clearing out space is the same regardless.
As you can see, your phone breaks your storage out into 5 categories. Apps,
iOS, Photos, Media and System Data. iOS is exactly what it sounds like, it’s
the part of your phone’s storage that’s needed for iOS, your phone’s operating system, to be
installed, and there’s not much you can do about this. If we scroll right down to the bottom of
this page, we can see specifically how much of the storage is being taken up by both iOS, and system
data. System Data, if we click into it, is defined by Apple as “caches, logs and other resources
currently in use by the system”. Apple also stated that the value will fluctuate over time,
although there are some ways that we can reduce this figure, we’ll come to that in just a moment.
Let’s scroll back up to the top. Like I said a moment ago, I’m aware that this phone, my phone,
clearly doesn’t have a storage issue, but for the sake of illustration, let’s assume it has. Let’s
assume that this bar is much larger, and that I’ve only got a couple of gigabytes of space remaining.
How would I go about clearing out some space? Let’s break the answer down, bit by bit.
The first place I would start might not clear out the most space, but it’s still important,
and that’s to look at your apps. Every app that you install takes up space on your phone,
and while many apps only take up a small amount, some apps can really clog things up for you,
so clearing some out is a great starting point. As you scroll down this list, you’ll notice that
the apps are listed in the order of how much storage they’re taking up, and there’s a couple
of ways that I would use the information here. The first is to look at the date that you last
used an app. For example, Lyft. I installed that when my wife and I were on holiday in the US,
we don’t have Lyft over here in the UK, and so this app is essentially useless to me,
and it’s taking up over 300 megabytes of space, so I would delete it. To do that, tap on it,
and choose Delete App. Note that you could offload the app if you wanted to, which is
where the storage used by the app itself will be freed up, but any documents associated with
it will be kept. Essentially, this is just your iPhone removing the app but retaining it’s data,
so that if you want to use it again, you just tap on it and your phone will re download it from the
cloud. It’s not a feature I use very often to be honest, but it’s there if you want it.
But this is where I would start, I would work through this list, and perhaps be a bit brutal
about what apps I have here, that I don’t have a need for anymore. There are apps on here that
I’ve not touched in more than 6 months, and they’re really just taking up unnecessary
space on my phone. Remember, anything that you want to download again at a later date,
you can, you just head to the App Store and download them from there.
So, whatever your storage situation on your iPhone is, there’s probably
going to come a time where you’re going to want some kind of external storage,
and if that’s the case, you should look at the T7 range by Samsung, who are sponsoring this video.
The T7 range of SSDs are well known for being reliable and fast, and Samsung currently offer 3
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All the drives can be secured with an AES 256 bit encrypted password,
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All of the drives come in a range of colours and storage sizes,
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Another way that I would use the iPhone Storage page of Settings, is to look for apps that are
mysteriously large. What I mean by that, is are there any apps where you would logically expect
them to be quite small, but they’re actually taking up loads of space? If yes, there’s
probably an opportunity for you to free up space. For example, a game like Call of Duty Mobile takes
up, according to the app’s page on the App Store, 2.5GB, so I would expect that to be quite large.
But an app like Insta360, the companion app for Insta360’s cameras, only requires around 700MB,
yet on my phone, it’s taking up much more than that. If we tap into the app in the storage page
of settings, you can see this for yourself. Now the Insta360 app is a companion app,
you use it for downloading footage from the Insta360 cameras to your phone, and then
you’d usually save that footage into your Camera Roll, but because of this, it’s easy to forget
that you’ve got footage sat in this app, so good practice would be to head into the Insta360 app,
and remove any footage in there. I won’t show you this, because this is going to be different
for all of the different apps out there and there are potentially hundreds of them, but
if you’ve got a DJI app, or maybe a Go Pro app, it’s definitely going to be worth taking a look.
Another major culprit for this is streaming apps, like Netflix, Disney Plus, any streaming
app that allows you to download content for viewing offline. Maybe you downloaded a load
of films and series to watch on the plane when you went on holiday, but then forgot to get
rid of them when you got back? Have a look for these apps here in that list, and if you notice
a particularly large storage number associated with any of them, head into the relevant app
and start clearing out your downloads. The Music app on the iPhone allows you
to download music to listen to later offline, and if you tap into that,
you can see specifically which audio you’ve got downloaded, and could start to have a clear out.
Spotify is another popular app worth mentioning, obviously a lot of people
use it, and a lot of people understandably download media to their phone using Spotify,
but you need to remove this media from within the Spotify app. If you open Spotify,
then choose Settings, then choose Storage, you can see a breakdown of what’s going on with your
Spotify storage. It’s a bit weird, here it gives you a breakdown of storage overall on the phone,
rather than just Spotify, it makes it seem more extreme at first than it actually is,
but if you do have downloads, you can either remove them manually,
or use the Remove all downloads button to get rid of them, thereby freeing up space.
As you can no doubt imagine, photos and videos that you’ve captured will make up
a sizeable chunk of the storage you’re using on your device. When you tap into
Photos from the iPhone Storage settings page, you can see that Apple don’t give
you much to work with. I can just see how much space my library is taking up, nothing more.
If you then head into the Photos app, you’ll notice that you can’t actually sort by size,
you can only sort by the date that the photos and videos were captured. My somewhat cynical,
but I reckon accurate take on this, is that Apple don’t want you to be able to sort by size,
because Apple don’t actually want you to do too much managing of photos and videos
on your devices. Ultimately, the more photos and videos you have, the more likely you are to need
to rely on a cloud service like iCloud, and so Apple would no doubt prefer users who take loads
of picture and videos on their phones without thinking too much about storage. You can see
this for yourself when you head to Apple’s support page, where their recommendations are to first,
check your storage usage, but then immediately turn to iCloud to help with your storage.
Using iCloud is probably your best solution in fairness. If you want to do this,
head into Settings, tap on your name up at the top of the screen, then choose iCloud,
then choose Photos. In here, you would enable iCloud Photos, and choose Optimise iPhone Storage,
so that your phone will look to only store full res versions of your photos and videos locally
when it has the space to do so, otherwise it will store them in the cloud instead.
Alternatively, if iCloud really isn’t for you, you could consider pulling photos and
videos from your phone and storing them in an alternative cloud backup,
or putting them on a physical drive of some sort.
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Back in the iPhone storage section of your Settings menu, another common culprit that’s
worth taking a look at is messaging apps. Here in the UK, WhatsApp is unfortunately the most
commonly used messaging app, so that’s the one that I’ve got taking up space, but for you this
could be Apple’s own messaging app, Telegram, Facebook Messenger or whatever. If I tap into
WhatsApp as an example, you can see that the app only requires just over 100 MB of space,
yet more than 2GB of space on my phone is devoted to WhatsApp. This would be a great place for me
to start, when it comes to clearing up space. For WhatsApp, open the app, then go to Settings,
then Storage and Data, then Manage Storage. WhatsApp do make this a bit confusing,
but essentially you’ve got large media items up at the top, items that have been forwarded many
times underneath, and then the media from chats underneath that. You can then work through this,
deleting what you like. I would also recommend going back a page, and ensuring that auto
download is switched off for everything, so that you’re not getting bombarded with media that’s
automatically sent and downloaded to your phone. Apple do at least make this a bit easier with
their own messages app. In iPhone storage, you can then tap into Messages, and see a breakdown
of where the storage is being used. You can then choose to delete photos, videos, or even full
messages if there are any in there that you don’t need anymore, that would help free up some space.
Back on the iPhone storage page of Settings, and you’ll notice that one of the more ambiguous
labels here is System Data, which is separate from iOS. This is constantly fluctuating,
it’s essentially space that your phone needs to operate, and deliver the best user experience to
you. Some of this is unavoidable, if you want a good iPhone experience, you need to accept that
your phone will need some of your storage to be able to deliver you that experience,
but there are still things you can tweak here. Your web browser cache probably isn’t one of
the biggest culprits when it comes to using up large amounts of storage on your iPhone,
I’d definitely look at all the other areas first. That said, it’s still worth knowing
how to clear it out, at the very least. Head to Settings, then Safari, and then
scroll down until you see Clear History and Website data. Now obviously, there are going to
be negative implications to this, any sites that you’d allowed to keep you logged in for example,
you’re going to have to log back in when you visit them now, but you might decide that the tradeoff
is worth it to gain a bit of storage back. If you head into Settings, then Messages, and
scroll down to where it says ‘Keep Messages’, you might want to consider changing this from Forever,
to 1 year or 30 days, especially if you text a lot. Those message threads do take up quite a bit
of space, so a clear out might not be a bad idea. The Siri voices that you have on your phone can
also be taking up more space than you might expect, and if you’ve auditioned or used
different voices before in the past, it’s possible that there’s files there that you’d be better
off getting rid of. Head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Spoken Content, then Voices.
If I tap into English, which is the language that I use for Siri, you can see that I’ve
got one stored for Daniel, and that’s the voice that I normally use, but if I also tap into Kate,
you can see that I’ve got 150MB dedicated to a voice for her also. You can tap edit up at the
top, and then use the delete options to remove those voice downloads from your phone. Not a
huge amount, 150MB each, but if you’re not using it, that’s space you should claw back.
The final option, the nuclear option I guess, if you feel like you’re wasting too much time
trying to free up storage on your phone, you might actually be quicker resetting your phone
to factory settings, and rebuilding it as a brand new device. Doing this will obviously remove all
the apps from your phone, but keep in mind, you can then go to the App Store and download the
main ones that you want. Before you do anything like this, ensure that you’ve got cloud backups
of anything that you really care about, because as I say, you will lose the originals, so things
like Photos and videos, if you’re not using iCloud, ensure that you’ve downloaded these and
stored them on an external drive, or ensure that you’re using an alternative cloud backup solution.
You would then go to Settings, then General, then Transfer or Reset iPhone,
and then choose Erase all Content and Settings, and then follow the instructions to do this.
So, there you go, that’s how you figure out how much storage you’re using on your iPhone, and some
tips for how to free up space. Could definitely be worth spending some time doing this, especially as
the iPhone 14s are just around the corner, and you want to make sure you’re not buying
more phone storage than you need. What about you, what makes up the majority of space on your phone?
Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it. And as ever, if you found this video useful,
do please consider leaving me a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content
like this in the future. See you on the next video.