We’ve all been in that inconvenient situation where we want to take a photo or video but we can’t, because our phone storage is suddenly full.
These are the moments when you don’t want to waste time sifting through which of your precious photos and favorite videos you’re willing to delete to free up space.
And one of the “biggest culprits” of phone storage space is typically picture galleries, said Shanika Whitehurst, associate director of product sustainability, research and testing at Consumer Reports. To address this, “Some phones have settings that allow you to decrease the resolution of the picture to reduce storage space.”
In fact, on iOS devices, it’s a setting you can toggle on. This can help you instantly free up more space on your phone without having to pay money to upgrade your iCloud. Learn how to take advantage of this built-in tool:
Why Optimizing Storage Can Help You Free Up Space
Unless you choose otherwise, the photos and videos you take on iPhone are stored in their original, high-resolution version ― and this default takes up significant space on a device.
If you are already storing photos to a remote-storage option like the cloud, you do not need to store them on your iPhone as well. When you need more storage fast, the “Optimize Storage” option will quickly reduce the image quality of the photos you keep on your phone, without making you delete anything.
Go to Photos in your Settings. From there, turn on “Optimize iPhone Storage.” This option tells your device to conserve space when it is low on storage by automatically replacing full-resolution photos with smaller-resolution versions that take up less space. Keep in mind that you need to have iCloud access to your photos enabled, in order for you to use this setting.
Once this option is on, when you click to view iPhone photos, you’ll see lower-resolution photos in your Photos app, but you will still have the option to download the better higher-resolution version, if desired, when you click on the photo.
If you use Apple Music, you can also choose to optimize music you don’t listen to as often. Go to Music, then select “Optimize Storage,” so that certain music you listen to less will be automatically removed from your library when your device is low on storage.
A Few Other Ways To Free Up Space On Phones Without Deleting Anything
Although “Optimize Storage” is perhaps the quickest way to have your phone prioritize space on your behalf, there are also other ways to get back storage on your device, fast.
Offload apps
If it’s been months since you last used a certain app on an iPhone, consider offloading this app so that it doesn’t take up so much space. Offloading is different from deleting the app altogether ― it simply uninstalls the app. It keeps the documents and data so that if you reinstall the app, you can pick up where you left off, as long as the app is still available for download.
To see which apps are taking up the most space, go to “iPhone storage” in your settings. From there you can sort the apps on your phone by size, and see which apps are the likely reason your storage keeps hitting capacity. Once you identify the app you want to offload, tap the app and select “Offload App.”
Androids, meanwhile, automatically stops unused apps from running in the background. To see if it’s an app you actually want to be active, go to Apps and select “Unused apps” to see which apps Google is identifying as lesser-used.
Merge duplicates
Our phones allow us to take dozens of photos of the same person with a tap, and we may not want to keep all of those photos a year later.
On iPhones, you can choose to merge duplicates of photos by going to the Photos app, then going to “Utilities,” then tapping “Duplicates.” From there, you can see and combine the duplicate photos and videos you want to merge.
On Android, Google also has duplicate detection, and you can access this setting through the “Duplicate files” option on your device.
Of course, reviewing and deleting the large attachments you send in messages is also one of the best ways to free up phone storage quickly. But if every gigabyte counts on your phone, it helps to know you can squeeze out a little more space without deleting your fave TikTok videos and meme screenshots from your phone.
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