Too much storage space is a myth. The more space you have, the more items you will tend to store until you get the dreaded ‘Storage Almost Full’ message on your precious iPhone/iPad. Fortunately, you don’t have to do much to clear storage space on your device. Follow these effective methods mentioned below, and your phone will have enough space for you to keep clicking and storing pictures, downloading videos or music, etc.
Clear Safari Cache
Safari is the default iPhone browser. Assuming you are using this, it will help clear your browser cache and clean up your iPhone storage space. The browser cache must be removed regularly to prevent the accumulation of unnecessary junk.
If you are surfing the Internet on your device, Safari will store a lot of information, most of which can be cleared, like images, cookies, and browser history data. Some of the data is regularly used, like bookmarks, but most are temporary data (cache). While the cache is temporary, it can take up significant storage space if not cleaned regularly.
You can clear the cache on your iPhone by going to Settings > Safari > tapping Clear History and Website Data > tapping Clear History and Data.
You can see how much storage space on your device is taken up by temporary files by tapping Advanced and Website Data.
Get Rid of Old Photos on Your Device
Go through your photo albums and delete the pictures you don’t need. However, tapping and deleting individual images can take days. Save your time and effort by opening Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Photos app > delete the “Recently Deleted” Album by tapping Empty.
You can open Review Personal Videos to see the largest videos stored on your device; if you don’t need them, you can delete them.
However, if you don’t want to delete your old photos but need to urgently clear storage space on your device, you can consider transferring the photos from your iPhone to your Mac. Learn all about it by clicking https://setapp.com/how-to/transfer-photos-from-iphone-to-mac-easily.
Remove Irrelevant Data from Netflix, Spotify, and Other Data-Hungry Applications
Netflix allows users to download their favorite movies or TV shows and watch them offline. Spotify Premium lets users save playlists and songs to listen to offline. If you are huge music or a movie buff, you will flip the Download switch without realizing you are downloading GBs of music and movies. Before long, your device will run out of space and be left wondering how.
To find the largest data hogs within your applications and to remove that system data to clear storage space on your phone, navigate to Settings > tap General > go to iPhone Storage. The screen will show you an overview of all the items taking up your device space. You can tap on an app to get more details and to check your options.
If you wish to delete an application but keep its files, you can use Offload App. Offloading an application is useful if you do not use the program often, the stored data is small, and the app is large. Also, you can re-download the app when you need it.
You can also clear app caches and delete and reinstall the apps to automatically get rid of all the temporary files that might be taking up storage space.
Delete Other Storage
The Storage list on iPhones categorizes all the items stored on the device. The Other storage tab finds any cache of junk files that your device does not know how to index. For instance, the files are automatically categorized as media when you download music. But if you stream music, your device will collect the cache and store it in Other storage.
You can remove junk files in Other storage by tapping Settings > General > iPhone Storage. You will see a graph on the screen showing how the files take up a lot of space. You can clear app data for individual applications to clean junk files from your phone.
Get Rid of Old iMessages
For your iPhone’s storage, group chats are a curse. Every picture, video, and attachment you send or receive is stored on your device until you delete them. All these files take up significant storage space on your device and are also a huge privacy concern.
You can clear storage space by removing old iMessages. Navigate to the list of applications shown on the iPhone Storage screen > tap Messages. You can remove the large attachments, such as photographs or videos. You can also go into the iMessage application directly and delete all the individual conversations.
The Bottom Line
If your phone’s storage is almost full and you want your device to breathe, follow these effective ways to clean up the storage space.