How To Free Up Storage Space On Your Smartphone

Find yourself frequently faced with the dreaded 'Storage Almost Full' notification? Or do you keep missing out the latest apps because you don't have enough space left on your smartphone?

Running out of storage can be a nightmare for any smartphone user, but there's no need to despair if you find yourself low on megabytes. Discover how you can make room for even more photos, videos and apps as you'd like with our handy smartphone storage saving tips below.

Smartphone Storage Tips

First, you'll want to find out exactly what's eating up your precious megabytes - or worse, gigabytes. To locate this on an iPhone, open 'Settings', select 'General' and tap 'iPhone Storage'. From here, you'll be able to see a detailed breakdown of how much room media, photos, individual apps and more take up.

You'll notice Apple also offer an option to 'Offload Unused Apps' - if you enable the feature it'll automatically remove apps you never use but save any related data, just in case you want to re-download at a later date. Android users can do the same by heading to 'Settings' and search for 'Storage' - the whereabouts of Storage varies, depending on the Android device you use. Once you've found it, click the 'Free Up Space' button (or something similar, device dependent) to quickly remove idle apps and data.

Manually Remove Media

After assessing where your storage is going, make a note of where you can free up some room. Take hundreds of the same photo to get the perfect shot, but leave the outtakes on your device? Delete them. Have a habit of downloading podcasts, but never remove them after you've listened? Start fine-tuning your list. Manually delete any apps too - they're often the worst culprits for taking up tons of space.

iMessage user? Save a few megabytes by heading into your conversations and removing the images and videos stored there. If you want to clear all your message history - including media - regularly, switch your settings. Head to 'Settings', then 'Messages' and change 'Message History' to 30 days.

Use the Cloud

Need even more space? The cloud is an online hard drive, where your files can be stored privately. When connected to the internet, you can access them anytime, anywhere, no matter what device you use. In fact, it can be really handy for anyone who frequently needs to access files and photos on multiple devices.

There are plenty of cloud services available, including Apple's iCloud and Google Drive. Many are free, unless you need to increase the amount of storage required. Check out our run-down of the best Cloud services, here.

Add a MicroSD card

Is the cloud not right for you? Whether you're heading somewhere without reliable internet access, simply prefer to store files on your device or need more storage space on your phone for important updates, a MicroSD card can be a great addition to almost any mobile.

While you can’t add a MicroSD to an iPhone, most Android phones will accept them. From 32GB, 64GB and beyond, you can add some serious storage space to your smartphone simply by inserting this handy little chip.

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