Free Up iPhone Space – 8 Ways to increase storage on iPhone

This one goes out to all of our iOS friends who rely on iPhones and iPads to keep connected but find themselves unable to upgrade or use all of the features available to them due to lack of storage. Because storage on these devices is not upgradeable it is really important to free up as much space as possible whenever you can.

Here are  tips to free up or Epand iPhone and iPad storage in iOS 9.

A great first step is to clean up those apps.

I know, apps are what makes your phone such a great digital companion. But they can also take up tons of storage if left unchecked. Apple has included an easy way to see which of apps are taking up the most storage. Simply go into Settings > General > Storage, and iCloud usage > Manage storage.

This shows all your apps, largest to smallest. Delete some of the largest apps you can do without and you can quickly get a few gigabytes back. Come on, are you still playing Words with Friends? I think not.

Stop saving those old messages.

If you noticed Messages is your largest app there is a good chance that the pictures, videos and other attachments you shared with friends and family are still sitting there taking up valuable storage space. This happens when your phone is set to keep messages forever. But, it’s a simple fix.

Go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and update you settings. You can choose from month, a year or forever. I highly recommend you to set this to a month if you use iMessage for pictures and other media. This will flush out all messages that are 1 month old while keeping newer messages saved in your iPhone.

Get rid of duplicate / Unwanted pictures

Now we know pictures and messages can be the culprit of low storage woes but pictures taken in general
with your phone can also cause issues. Most people no longer use traditional cameras. So, many of have multiple photos of the same thing on our phone and never delete any copies.

There’s a few ways to take great photos & videos without using so much space. When taking HDR photos
don’t keep copies of both the HDR & normal photos. Go to Settings > Photos & Camera and
uncheck “Keep normal photo”. Doing this will keep only the HDR version of a photo which was taken in HDR mode. It keeps normal photos if HDR is off which is exactly what we want.

Also, make sure “Live photos” are turned off. These are fun but can use up to 2x more storage. Go to your camera app and toggle “Live photos” to off. When shooting video, if you use 720p instead of 1080 or 4K, that can save up to 5x as much space. Go to Settings > Photos & Camera > Record video
and change to your desired resolution.

Delete Watched movies and TV shows

If you love to watch HD movies and TV shows on your phone, you are not alone. But you may be taking up tons of space on your phone. The great thing about buying media from iTunes is that you can delete them from your device and stream or download them again when you are ready to re-watch.

Go to the Video app and tap “Edit” on the top right. iTunes will place a “X” over all the videos saved to your phone.

Delete old Podcasts

Podcasts can also take up lots of space if you aren’t careful. As more and more people create podcasts,
you may find yourself filling up storage quickly with the latest episodes of your favorite show. There’s no need to save episodes of podcasts you’ve already listened to.

Go to Settings > Podcasts and make sure “Delete Played Episodes” is selected.

If  even these tips mentioned above don’t help you free up much storage on your iPhone then you can certainly try a couple of tricks to free up apps and data that you don’t necessarily have to have on your iPhone. I am talking about duplicate files and system updates that you have already installed and they are sitting quitely in your iPhones storage doing nothing.

Delete downloaded movies

While Mobile safari doesn’t allow download of many file types, there are many 3rd party apps available on Apple App Store that not only allow you to download movies but other files like zip and rar. If you like to download and watch movies, TV Shows on your iPhone using this method, then there is a very high chance that your iPhone is copying these files while you are thinking that you have deleted them.

What I mean to say here can be better understood by an example. Suppose you download a 1080p movie in your iPhone and then play that movie in VLC Player or Infuse Player. Once you finished watching that movie you delete it from the download app and its gone. Right?

Wrong, because iOS apps are limited in a way that they can not access other apps data. In this example, VLC or Infuse has to copy that movie from the downloading app to its own sandbox. Making another copy of that same file. Then they can play that file.

If this has happened to you then You can easily fix this. Go to Settings > General > Storage, and iCloud usage and see if any of video player is using a lot of storage that you don’t know of.

One you found out that there is a video player using your iPhone’s storage space, delete those movies by going into the Video player app.

Clear cache and unwanted data without iCleaner Pro

In iPhone there is a problem with the Updates. What happens is that when you update you iPhone to a news version of iOS then sometimes the downloaded update that is already installed remains in your iPhone taking valuable storage.

Many times we think that we need to jailbreak to clear that junk out of iPhone but you definitely don’t have to. There is an app called Battery Doctor which allowes you to clean up all that junk out of your iPhone without needing to jailbreak. The app is linked here make sure you check it out.

Use Wi-Fi enabled storage devices

Our smartphones are the best media entertainment devices that we carry with us everywhere. You can store as many movies and songs in them as the storage allowes you. While it’s a good idea to keep your media library with you while you are traveling or something but you don’t have to keep it on your phone.

Wireless media sharing devices such as wifi card readers are a good option to store your media files on them. There are several types of Wi-Fi Storage devices like Card readers, Hard Drives, etc

These type of Devices have some advantages and disadvantages with them.

Advantages:

• You can store your data in Tera Bytes, Using Hard Drives, it them
• You can charge your Apple or any other device on the go as most of these devices offer charging facility as well.
• No need of Internet
• Can Attach SD cards and USB Flash Drives

Disadvantages:

• These devices are powered by battery so there is a certain up time for these devices and you will have to charge another device with your laptop, mobile, tablet and camera.
• These devices can go very expensive specially if you opt for SSD solution.
• If you choose to get a wireless hard drive then you will have to take extra care because hard drives are not very good when it comes to handling drops and torture.

Seagate Wireless plus, is a Wifi Enabled Solid State Drive that we recommend.  if someone is willing to get a wireless storage to carry around.

Update:

Here is a new iOS app that lets you clean up junk files from your iPhone in 2 simple steps. Download the app from the link given below.

Open this app and press the dust bin icon. It will show you a notification that your iPhone storage is full. Ignore that warning.

Now this app will show you how much storage it has cleaned.

That’s it. I hope you have enjoyed reading this article and it helped you free up tons of storage on your iPhone. Make sure to share this article with your friends who might find it helpful and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for future updates.