Three easy ways to clear up space on your iPhone

Running out of storage on your iPhone is a common issue and clearing up space can be a little complicated. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to easily free up space on your iPhone.

Reducing storage taken up by apps

First, take a look at your downloaded apps and delete the apps you’re not using. Apps can hold all kinds of data in them and sometimes take up a lot of space even when you’re not using them. Deleting unused apps is a good practice and you can always use the “offload unused apps” option, if you’d like to keep the app icons on your home screen. Offloading unused apps will remove apps from your phone, but keep the icons on your home screen so you can quickly get the app back any time by simply tapping the icon.

For the apps you’re regularly using, take a look at what’s inside. Some apps hold saved files inside and these can eat up a lot of space. Photo editing apps, video apps, podcasts or music apps can all take up a lot of space if the have a lot of data saved in them. The process is different depending on the apps you’re using, but go in the app, see if there’s any files that are saved or downloaded for offline use and clear what you don’t need.

Free up space by deleting old messages and attachments

Another easy way to clear up space is to go through your messages and delete old conversations. If your messages are only text-based they probably don’t take up too much space, but if you’re like me and like to share photos and videos with friends and family, those attachments in your conversations start to take up a lot of space over time. Make it a habit to regularly scan through your conversations and delete the ones you don’t need anymore.

The biggest storage consumer – photos and videos

Lastly, the biggest and easiest way to free up space is to transfer your photos and videos to a computer and then delete them from your phone. This is good for a couple of reasons – it helps you free up space on your phone, but you’ll also have a backup of your important photos and videos in case your phone breaks or goes missing. We’ll show you a couple of different ways to transfer photos to a Mac.

One easy option is to use the Photos app on your Mac. This works similarly to the Photos app on your iPhone, so after transferring photos to your Mac, you’ll use the Photos app to view your photo library. I’m personally not a huge fan of this for a couple of reasons. When you import photos into the Photos app, they’re stored in your Photos App Library so you can’t access them through Finder. You’re limited to the functionality in the Photos app, so if I want to pull up an old photo and open it in Photoshop, it can’t be done. I like to have full manual access to all my photos and be able to browse them through Finder, which is why I prefer to use Image Capture.

Image Capture is a simple application used to transfer photos from an external device to your Mac. You can use it with your iPhone or any camera or external media, whether it’s an SD-card, hard drive or your video camera’s built-in storage. In Image Capture, you can preview all your photos and videos, pick the ones you want to transfer, and choose a destination volume or folder for them. Then you’ll transfer the files over, and once the transfer is complete you can delete them from the original destination, in this case, your iPhone. To me this has been the easiest way to quickly back up my photos and videos, have them in a specific folder on an external hard drive and then wipe them from my phone to free up some storage space.

iCloud+, the convenient option that also backs up your photos

If you want to keep all your photos on your phone but still free up space, you can upgrade to iCloud+. This will store your photos in the cloud instead of your phone’s built-in storage, so you can access them from any device and they won’t take up space on your phone. iCloud+ will cost you a little bit of money but it’s relatively cheap and the lowest tier is sufficient for most people. A lot of subscription services have been raising their prices lately so the pricing could always change, but right now the different tiers for iCloud+ are the following:

50GB for $0.99/month

200GB for $2.99/month

2TB for $9.99/month

6TB for $29.99/month

12TB for $59.99/month