You’re probably not aware of how much storage your apps, photos, and other docs are eating up on your phone until you hit a wall when trying to update iOS or download new apps. Every photo-heavy text or Spotify podcast download puts you closer to the limit, perhaps inspiring you to see how much it would cost to buy a new phone with more storage. Before you empty your bank account for more GBs, however, we have some advice for cleaning up your phone without losing access to the apps and services you use most.
Check Your Total Usage
First, assess how much space you have. Go to Settings > General > [Device] Storage. At the top, you’ll see a color-coded bar chart showing how much space each app category takes up on your device. This can include apps, messages, and photos. Note that a small portion of your device’s memory will always be used up by the operating system
You don’t need to understand these numbers deeply. To update iOS, you’ll generally want to have up to 10GB of free space. If you simply want to have enough room to take new photos and install new apps, give yourself at least 2GB of free space.
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How to Reduce ‘Other’ Storage
In some cases, you might notice an “Other” category in light gray. This is mostly cached images and videos in texts, music and video streaming, and browser activity, among other things. While you can’t eliminate it, you can reduce it if you need the space.
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Go to Settings > General, and find the apps that use the most data. If your streaming apps, for instance, occupy a couple of gigs and you don’t have anything downloaded on those services, uninstall them and reinstall them. This will clear out the cache.
You might have the ability to get rid of some cached items directly if you come across a Review Downloaded Videos section on this page. Clicking on it to see cached videos, which you can delete individually. You might also see Review Large Attachments, which will show you file-by-file images, videos, PDFs, and other things that have been cached in Messages. These files appear in order of how much space they take up, and you can delete them one at a time.
If things are really tight, you can try a factory reset to clear out the “other” cache.
Delete or Offload Apps
If you continue scrolling down under Storage, you’ll see a list of all your apps, sorted by how much space they consume. Another way to list them is by Last Used Date. Select any app, and a new page shows usage in two sections: App Size (the space the app occupies) and Documents & Data (the space occupied by associated data files).
In the example below, the Snapchat app takes up 331.7 MB, but all the messages and media stored in it take up 6.04GB at the moment. Sometimes, this info helps you see that it’s not the app that takes up space, but rather what you store in it. For instance, if you have a lot of YouTube videos saved to your phone, the app as a whole will take up a lot more room. In this case, you can see that Documents & Data are taking up the most space.
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Once you have a sense of what is taking up the most room, you can start clearing things out. On the storage page, you can select an App and choose Offload App to delete the app while retaining the associated files, or Delete App to remove everything. To delete apps from the Home screen, long-press an icon, then select Remove App > Delete App from the menu. Any purchased app is always available to re-download at no extra charge from the App Store.
If you want to temporarily disable apps without deleting their settings, like when you have to free up space to install an iOS update, Apple lets you offload them. They’ll remain on the device, but you’ll need to take a moment to re-download them before you can get back in. Find the app on the storage list, tap it, and select Offload App. You can also set up the automatic removal of apps you don’t use often. Go to Settings > Apps > App Store and enable Offload Unused Apps if it isn’t already set up.
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Cut Down on Your Photos and Videos
Apple Photos often takes up a lot more space than people realize, so let’s deal with that app directly. Under Settings > General > [device] Storage, find Photos to see how much storage it’s using. If you have more than 1GB here, you should consider copying photos and videos to a cloud storage service so you can delete them from your device.
If you’d like to remove individual images you no longer want, I recommend sorting them. To do this, open the app, tap the Sort icon, and then choose a category. This way, you can get all your edited photos or screenshots on one screen and delete them. Remember that anything you delete will remain on the device for 30 days, so if you need more space right now, delete them permanently by going to Collections > Utilities > Recently Deleted.
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You can also choose to keep lower-resolution photos on your phone while keeping the full-resolution ones in iCloud. Go to Settings > Apps > Photos and make sure Optimize iPhone Storage is enabled. iCloud Photos must be enabled to use this feature.
Remove Unwanted Music
Multimedia, such as audio and video files, takes up a lot of space. If you use Apple Music, make sure to delete any audio or video files you might be storing locally for offline listening. Go to Settings > General > [Device] Storage > Music, and you can swipe left on any albums or tracks you don’t want and delete them. Hit the Edit button to delete multiple entries at once. You can also do this right in the Music app from Library > Downloaded.
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Clean Out Your Messages
Unless you like to hang onto conversations for sentimental (or legal) reasons, delete all “running late” or “what do you want for dinner?” texts to free up some space. You’ll make even more room if you’re heavy into sending video, photos, and audio files via Apple Messages. An easy way to do this is to open Settings > General > [Device] Storage > Messages to see the data usage for conversations, photos, videos, GIFs, and stickers. You might see a section that says Review Large Attachments, which will really make it simple to track down the worst offenders.
If you like to live dangerously, set texts to delete automatically. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages > Message History, then choose to keep messages for 30 days or one year.
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Empty Your Browser’s Cache
Another smidgen of junk to wipe is your phone’s browser cache. For Safari, go to Settings > Apps > Safari, then scroll down to the History and Website Data section. Here, you can tap Clear History and Website Data, then choose to clear the last hour, today, today and yesterday, or all history.
For Chrome on iOS, open the app, tap the three-dot icon, then choose Delete Browsing Data. Pick your timeframe, then hit Browsing data and choose what specific information you want to clear out. For this purpose, you can deselect everything but Cached images and files, then hit Confirm and Delete data.
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Manage iCloud Storage
If you’re relying on the extra space you get from iCloud, make sure everything on the online storage service needs to be there. If you’re in a bind, one thing you might be able to cut is your iCloud backup. Head to Settings, select your name, and then open iCloud > iCloud Backup. Choose your device’s most recent backup, and you’ll be able to remove individual apps from the file or delete it from iCloud entirely. You can further customize your data under the Saved to iCloud section, which allows you to set which photos and video, iCloud Drive files, and apps sync to the cloud
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Subscribe to iCloud+
To start, Apple only gives you 5GB of storage space in iCloud. That’s not a lot. If you can’t find anything to delete, you might just have to pay for iCloud+ to add more storage. You can do that from your device by opening Settings, tapping your name, and then going to iCloud > Upgrade to iCloud+ and choosing the plan that works best for you. It costs $0.99 per month for 50GB of online storage, $2.99 per month for 200GB, and $9.99 per month for 2TB. For $19.95 per month, you can also subscribe to the Apple One bundle to nab 50GB, in addition to Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple Arcade.
Chandra Steele contributed to this story.
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Jason Cohen
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As PCMag’s editor of how to content, I have to cover a wide variety of topics and also make our stories accessible to everyday users. Considering my history as a technical writer, copywriter, and all-around freelancer covering baseball, comics, and more at various outlets, I am used to making myself into an expert.
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My job as how-to guru means I use just about every gadget under the sun, so I can figure out how everything works. I work from a Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 11, but also have a very large Dell Inspiron 17 3000 and Apple silicon MacBook. I also have a Google Pixel 6a for personal use and use a Galaxy Z Flip 4 for additional Samsung-related testing. For iOS coverage, an iPhone 13 mini works like a charm, though it’s already becoming a little long in the tooth.
My desktop situation includes a dual monitor setup with a modest Acer monitor. I also use a Logitech mouse (who can use these ThinkPad trackpads) and a Havit keyboard (my first mechanical keyboard; I love it but my wife hates it!). I’m a recent convert from wired headphones; I have Anker Soundcore Liberty Air wireless earbuds for personal use and have taken to the Sennheiser HD 450BT headphones for work.
Whenever I have a second to myself, I’m probably gaming on my Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, or Xbox Series S. I also still have a bunch of classic consoles lying around as well.
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