Three quick ways to free up storage on your iPhone

Every iPhone runs out of storage eventually and one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s frustratingly difficult to clear up space on your phone. In a perfect world there would be a way to plug your phone into a computer, click a single button to transfer all contents from your phone to a computer and start fresh. But… the world is not perfect and the ways to clear your iPhone are a little more complicated. Here are three easy ways to clear up a big chunk of storage on your iPhone.

The most common things eating up all your storage are

1. Apps you have downloaded and files contained within those apps. This can be something like podcasts that were downloaded into your podcasts application, music saved for offline listening or video/photo files saved into your video and photo editing apps.
2. Photos and videos you’ve taken on your phone. This all gets saved into your camera roll and usually ends up being the biggest consumer of storage space.
3. Large attachments in your iMessages. If you send a lot of videos and photos to your friends and family, those take up space as “attachments”, clearing up these will free up space on your phone.

Clearing up space by deleting unused apps

When you download apps on your phone there’s two things to keep in mind. First, the app itself contains data and will take up some space on your iPhone. The amount of storage required by the app depends on the app – my Instagram app for example takes up almost 2GB on my phone while Netflix takes only 300MB or 0.3GB. So the first place to start is to delete any unsed apps. There’s an easy way to do this by selection “offload unused apps” under Settings – General – iPhone Storage, or you can manually delete apps you don’t need.

The other thing to keep in mind is what we discussed earlier, data saved inside your apps. I have GoPro’s Quik app installed on my phone and a lot of videos from my GoPro get transferred to the Quik app. These will usually take up a lot of space and they don’t get cleared when I empty my camera roll, so I have to delete them manually inside the Quik app. Take a look at the list of applications under your iPhone Storage menu and inspect any apps that take up a large amount of space. Usual suspects include Podcasts if you have downloaded episodes for offline listening, music applications for the same reason or any photo and video editing apps.

Transferring photos and videos from your iPhone to a computer

AirDrop

For most people this is the biggest reason your iPhone runs out of space – the high-quality photos and videos you take on your phone will fill up your storage over time and eventually you’ll need to find a way to transfer those photos somewhere else.

For small amounts you can use AirDrop. Just AirDrop photos to a computer, save them in a safe place and then delete them off your phone. The problem with AirDrop is that with large amount of photos and videos it usually fails, so if you’re dealing with multiple gigabytes of content it’s time to look for other options.

Transferring files through a wired connection is always the fastest and most stable option. Connect your iPhone to your computer with a cable and it’ll become available in the sidebar of your Finder window. Now you have two options – you can use Apple’s Photos app or manually transfer photos and videos to your preferred location.

Photos App

Photos app works similar to how it is on your phone – it holds all your photos and videos inside the Photos app and you’ll do everything through the app. Watching, browsing and sharing photos is all done in the app. The downside of this is that you can’t access your photos through Finder or other applications. Sometimes I want to pull up a specific photo and open it in Photoshop, so for this kind of use Photos app is not the best option. That’s why I personally prefer Image Capture.

Image Capture

Image Capture is a handy little tool that allows you to transfer photos and videos from any source, whether that’s an iPhone or a professional camera or just an SD-card, to anywhere on your computer. You can manually select the photos and videos you want to transfer, pick a location for them either on your computer or on an external hard drive, and once you’re done transferring your files you’ll have the option to delete them off your iPhone. This has been my go-to option for years. Simple, effective and gives me the freedom to store photos anywhere I want.

iCloud+

If you don’t want to deal with wired connections and data transfers another option to manage your storage is to upgrade to iCloud+.

iCloud+ expands the cloud storage connected to your iCloud account, allowing you to store your photos and videos in the cloud, freeing up storage on your device. The nice thing about this is that you’ll have access to your photos on all your devices and they’re safe in the cloud, so if your phone gets lost or damaged, you’ll still have a copy of all your photos.

Besides expanding your storage iCloud+ comes with some cool privacy features like iCloud Private Relay, which hides your IP address when browsing with Safari, Hide My Email which literally hides your email from websites and services you log in to and HomeKit Secure Video, which enables video from your doorbell and security cameras to be recorded and uploaded to iCloud.

iCloud+ has different tiers based on how much storage you need. The cheapest option is usually enough for most people and it comes with 50GB of cloud storage for $0.99/month.

Clearing up space by deleting old iMessages

Deleting photos and videos might be the fastest way to clear up space on your phone, but it doesn’t clear everything on your phone. If you share a lot of photos and videos with your friends using Messages you’ll probably have conversations on your phone with large attachments taking up space. Settings – General – iPhone Storage should give you a breakdown of conversations with large attachments. Review those and delete the ones you don’t need anymore.

iOS & System Data

If you browse the storage view on your phone you might see all the way on the bottom that both iOS and System Data take up quite a bit of space. These are files necessary for your phone to function and they’re not accessible to the user. iOS is simply your operating system, without iOS your phone is just a fancy brick. System Data often includes temporary cache files allowing your phone to process things faster and it will fluctuate as you use your phone. I was checking mine and System Data was taking up 10GB, but after restarting my phone it went down to 5GB. I wouldn’t worry about System Data since you can’t really do anything about it, but if you’re really struggling and need a temporary relief restarting your phone might give you a few more gigabytes to work with.

One More Thing…

The tips above should help you free up space on your iPhone. If you transferred files to your computer it’s important to think about backups. Every hard drive dies at some point, so if you’re holding a large amount of important photos and videos anywhere on your computer or external hard drive, you have to have a plan for backups. What happens to your photos if that hard drive fails, or gets stolen, or if your house burns down. You can use a second hard drive to keep a duplicate of your files, but for a proper backup plan you’ll need an offsite copy, something that protects you even if your house gets destroyed.

I’m a big fan of Backblaze cloud backup. You install it on your computer and it runs silently in the background, backing up everything to the cloud continuously. The best part? Backblaze is unlimited, meaning there’s no limit for how much data you can back up. Any amount of data or external hard drives, it’ll all get backed up. It’s relatively cheap for what you’re getting, so if you don’t have a backup plan for your files yet, I highly recommend installing something like this.

If you’re interested, here’s a link that gets you one month of Backblaze for free