How To Clean Up Your iPhone Or iPad To Free Up Space

If you iPhone or iPad is almost full, you may need to take the time to clean out things you no longer need. iOS makes this easy by providing a list of apps showing how much space each uses and giving you controls to delete content. You can also change settings for Messages, Photos and the Camera apps so you use less space.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to clean up your iPhone so you can free up some space. 
MacMost is supported by viewers just like you. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content.
So if the storage on your iPhone or iPad is almost full then you may want to clear out some space so you can store more photos, add more music. Things like that. The first thing to do is go to the Settings app. In there look for General. Then go to iPhone Storage. This is the central place where you can go to see exactly what's taking up space on your phone. There are also a lot of things you can do right here to get space back. The chart at the top shows you how much space is taken up in your iPhone. As you can see I've got plenty of space here. But you may see something that's almost all the way full. Then you're going to get some recommendations. Your recommendations are going to be different than mine. But let's look at mine as an example.
First it says Review Downloaded Videos. I go into that and it's going to show me apps that store video. In my caae I've got Netflix and I've got Amazon Prime Video. Both allow you to download videos so that you can watch them off line. Here it will show you a list of the videos that it has stored and how much space they take up. Not all apps that store video are going to be shown here. An app has to be built in such a way to tell the Settings app exactly what it has. So some apps you may actually have to go into individually and go to the menus inside that app to delete stored video. With these two it makes it really easy having it here. So I swipe all the way across and hit Delete. You can also swipe partially across to get a Delete button or hit the Edit button there and tap on any of these to bring up the Delete button. The big swipe seems to be the quickest way to do it. So review everything that you've got here and see what you can get rid of for now.
The next suggestion is going to be Review Large Attachments in the Messages app. Notice the icon there is for Messages. So it's going to go through all my messages and it's going to notice I've got some photos there on some messages and I can get rid of them right here the same way. It's going to show me how much space each one is taking up and also how old it is. So it's going to be easy to go through and get rid of some of the larger attachments in my conversations.
After that you're going to see a list of apps. It's going to be in order of apps that use the most storage. So my Photos app is first here. Now there are no options in here other than just telling me how much space Photos is using. I'm using iCloud Photo Library so it's already saved me a lot of space. You can see here it's taking up 5 GB or space but my actual Photos Library is more like 100 GB.
Other entries here will give you some more options. Music is taking up 4 GB of space. I'm using Apple Music so this is just the music that's cache. The stuff I can listen to offline. I can scroll down here and I can get rid of things the same way there. I could also go to the top and I can actually get rid of all songs. So clear out the cache. I can still stream music like before but it will clear that cache out, give me all that space back, and kind of start me off at zero for what songs I have available off-line. If you're not using Apple Music but are syncing music from your computer then you may want to resync but select fewer songs to sync to save some space. 
Now other apps here have options. If I go into a typical app I'm going to see two options here. Offload app and Delete app. Delete app gets rid of it completely. It's off of the Home screen. The app is gone and any data such as settings, preferences, saved games will be gone from the phone. Offloading does something a little different. It gets rid of the app itself but saves the app data. In fact the icon still appears on my Home screen. So it looks like I still have the app installed. But when I tap the app to run it, it's going to download it first and reinstall it and then open the app. The data is still going to be there so it'll pickup where I left off. If my connection is fast enough and my app is small enough I may not even notice the difference. 
Offloading apps is a great way to save space. If you go back to this list here you can see the last used date on an app and how much space it's using. You can make judgement calls about which apps you should offload. Now some apps like Audible store media in the app so it's taking up a lot of space. In this case 715 MB. Unfortunately there's no list here of my Audible books that I can go through and Delete. I have to go into the Audible app to do that. A lot of apps work that way. So it's going to be a matter of seeing that you've got a lot of data in an app. Then going into the app itself and clearing out a lot of that data. Podcast is another app that actually shows you data and what's being used and you can delete it right there. 
Now let's go back up to the top level of the Settings app. Go and look for Messages. Messages has a very useful function here that helps you save a lot of space. If you look for Keep Messages you can see I have it set to keep messages forever. But if you get a lot of messages from a lot of people that's going to take up a lot of space very quickly. You can set Messages to automatically delete every 30 days or one year after you get them. This could save a lot of space right now and also could continue to save space as messages get old and drop off the end.
Also if you go down to the Photos app you'll see some things here. Obviously turning on iCloud Photos saves you a lot of space. For me it's saving about 95 G of space. Having iCloud Photos turned on and having it set to optimize iPhone storage. So I only see thumbnails of all my photos and the most recent ones that I've looked at very recently. If I were to switch that to download and keep originals I would have my entire collection on here. 
Also notice the option to have Photo Stream. Photo Stream is a very old Cloud service and it's not needed for most people. If you're using iCloud Photos now then you probably don't need Photo Stream. I think a lot of people have it turned on and aren't actually using it. If you're not really using Photo Stream or you don't even know what it is then have it turned off. That will save some space on your phone.
Also go to the Camera app. There are two settings here that can save space. One is the Format. You have High Efficiency format on newer phones that can use 8GIC formation instead of JPEG and the files are much smaller. This could save a ton of space on your phone. But if you have an older computer and it can't use 8GIC then you're going to have to have it set to Most Compatible using JPEG. So use High Efficiency if you can. Also Record Video allows you to set the format for recording videos. If you record videos just for fun and you're not actually professionally using them then you may want to set to something really low and the videos will take up a lot less space.
Now if you actually go into the Photos app and you scroll down you'll see some albums set to Media Types. Here's where you can go and see what videos you've got. You may be surprised to see you've got a ton of video there. If you're used to taking videos and not thinking about the storage space on your iPhone you may have a lot there. You may want to go through and get rid of some of the ones that you're not using. Maybe transfer them to your computer and archive them to files outside of your Photos Library. You may want to go into some of these. Then you can actually trim them so you can hit Edit there at the top and then you could Trim the video.
Also there's another Media Type here called Bursts. Bursts take up a lot of space because they are actually a series of photos. So you may have what looks like one photo but it could be 10, 20, 50 photos in there. So when you go into a Burst you can hit Select at the bottom and then you can go through and choose the one you want to keep. Hit Done. It will ask you if you want to keep everything, so it keeps everything the same. Or Keep Only 1 Favorite. Then if you do that it just saves that one photo and gets rid of the rest.
Now keep in mind once you've gotten rid of bursts or you've deleted other photos and videos that stuff is still going to be stored there. It's going to be under Recently Deleted. If you go into there and then you can hit Select and then you can hit Delete All at the bottom left hand corner or Select some of those and then hit Delete just to delete the selected ones. This is when it really gets rid of them and saves you the space on your phone. Kind of like the Trashcan on a Mac.
Now as you clear things off you can always go back here to see how you're doing. Keep in mind it sometimes takes time for this to update especially if you're doing things like deleting lots of photos. If you delete a thousand photos it's not going to delete them all immediately. Instead it's going to do it over a few minutes. You can always Exit the screen and then go back in it to update. But I would wait to actually see the final result. Some people report that restarting the phone actually saves you a little bit of extra space once you've done some cleaning. I would wait some time before actually doing that because if it's in the middle of deleting photos or clearing out things in other apps then you don't want to interrupt that by restarting your phone.
I hope you found these tips useful. If you are always running out of space on your iPhone or iPad keep that in mind the next time you buy a new one so that you get one that has enough space so you can do the things you want to do on your iPhone or iPad.

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Clean Up Your iPhone Or iPad To Free Up Space”

Bert Mullemeister

5 years ago

Hi Gary
enjoyed the videos. I have a iPhone 11Pro (with latest IOS installed) and a iPad Pro and when I go the general/iPhone storage it does not show the 2 review as per your video,,,it only shows Offload Unused Apps. I used that as per your recommendation and that is no longer showing
Hope you can advise...thanks in anticipation

Gary Rosenzweig

Bert: Since those are "recommendations" they are customized to your situation. So you just don't have any at the moment.

Comments Closed.

How To Clean Up Your iPhone Or iPad To Free Up Space

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Clean Up Your iPhone Or iPad To Free Up Space”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information