UNLOCK your iPhone and get your thumbs ready to hit “delete” – because there’s a folder you need to empty out right now.
It’s packed with loads of useless stuff that will be gobbling up your valuable storage.
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An iPhone’s storage space is precious stuff: it’s where all of your photos, videos and apps are kept. It can fill up pretty quickly.
Usually getting extra storage means paying for pricier iPhone models – and then you’ll fork out even more to back it up with iCloud.
So one solution is to trim the amount of storage that you need in the first place.
SPACE SAVER
Go into your Photos app and scroll down until you find the Utilities section.
In there, you should see a tab called Duplicates.
This is where Apple keeps track of every photo and video that you’ve got doubles, triples, or even quadruples of.
It can happen very easily, especially if you use an app like WhatsApp where you might receive the same image in multiple chats.
I checked my duplicates folder and found a frankly shocking 10,843 duplicate pictures and clips.
By clearing them out, I instantly free up dozens of gigabytes of storage.
If you’ve got lots of videos in particular, you might find yourself unlocking even more storage space.
Each item will be listed in order of recency.
You’ll be able to see the duplicate files, each with a Merge button alongside it.
If you hit Merge, the duplicates will be removed leaving you with an original file.
To make the job quicker, you can tap the Select button in the top-right.
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This will let you quickly tap on all of the duplicate files that you want to free up and merge them all in one clean sweep.
There’s even an option to Select All on this page, so you can merge everything in an instant.
That’s the fastest way to free up space, as manually selecting each Merge could take ages if you’ve never cleared out your Duplicates before.
It’s a good idea to check your Duplicates folder every few months to make sure that it isn’t clogging up with unnecessary doubles.
DON’T BREAK THE 1GB RULE!
Low storage isn’t just annoying – it could be ruining your iPhone…
Apple has a ‘1GB rule’ that you must never break.
It refers to the minimum amount of free storage space available on your iPhone.
Your iPhone’s performance can drop significantly if you have less than 1GB of free space.
Check your iPhone storage by going into Settings > General > iPhone Storage.
“If your device is low on storage, iOS or iPadOS automatically frees up space while installing an app, updating iOS or iPadOS, downloading music, recording videos, and more,” Apple explains.
“iOS or iPadOS only removes items that can be downloaded again or that aren’t needed anymore.”
Apple adds: “If your available storage is consistently less than 1GB, your device might slow down as iOS or iPadOS repeatedly makes room for more content.”
Picture Credit: Apple / The Sun
EXTRA SPACE
If this doesn’t free up enough space, you’ve got some other options too.
The easiest thing to do is going into Settings > General > iPhone Storage.
This will show how much free space you have left, and it even details which apps are taking up the most storage.
More importantly, you should find a list of recommendations at the top of the page.
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These are one of the most effective ways of freeing up storage space on an iPhone.
For instance, you can use Offload Unused Apps to keep the files associated with apps you don’t use regularly – but removing the apps themselves.
Then you can restore them when you need them without having to keep them saved the whole time.
You might also see an option to Remove Older Downloads.
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This will let you keep just the latest five automatically downloaded episodes per show on your iPhone.
It won’t affect anything that you’ve saved or manually downloaded.
And you can hit Review Downloaded Media to see what’s saved on your iPhone – letting you scrub anything that you don’t want.
You could easily free up huge amounts of space with these tricks, so they’re worth trying before you fork out on a pricier iPhone model with extra storage.
