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Seven easy ways to increase iPhone storage space

By January 22, 2018Tips

iPhone storage spaceIf you own an older iPhone, or one of the less expensive newer models, you probably find yourself hitting storage limits as new apps, photos, and data take up space on the device’s storage. The following tips are not a permanent solution to the iPhone storage problem, but may offer some temporary relief:

  1. Remove apps that you seldom use. Optional Apple apps such as Keynote and Garage Band are huge storage hogs. Graphics-heavy games are also culprits; some of them take upwards of a gigabyte apiece!
  2. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and check to see if an individual account (such as Gmail, or a Microsoft Exchange account) has an option called Mail days to sync. If so, lower the setting to 1 week or less. Fewer messages will be kept on the iPhone, thereby freeing up more space for other data.
  3. Open Settings > Photos. If the iCloud Photo Library is toggled on, you will be able to select Optimize iPhone Storage. This keeps low-resolution versions of the image on the phone, while saving the high-resolution versions in Apple’s remote iCloud servers.
  4. Open the Photos app, and turn off Live Photos by pressing the circular icon. This will result in smaller photo file sizes.
  5. Under Settings >Camera, change the Record Video and Record Slo-mo options to a lower quality setting, which will result in smaller video file sizes.
  6. Go through your recent photos and videos and select those you no longer want, then tap the trashcan icon. Then, open the Photos app, go to Albums, and open Recently Deleted. The photos and videos there will be permanently removed after about a month, but you can speed up the process by selecting them and tapping Delete All.
  7. If you listen to Podcasts, mark old episodes you have already listened to as Played (tap the more actions icon that looks like three dots and select Played). Then, go to Settings > Podcasts and change the download setting to Only new and make sure Delete Played Episodes is toggled on.

These tips were excerpted from an IN 30 MINUTES guide. To learn more about the guides, browse our catalog.

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