Free Up Space on Your iPhone

The Guru has been there – he’s about to shoot a video of an acolyte’s meditation revelations and (Holy Ashram!) his phone is out of space. Gnashing of teeth suppressed, the Guru knows what to do. It isn’t random deleting of boring photos of dead relatives (they may be reincarnated later – the relatives that is).  

To find out your storage hogs, click on Settings and then: General > Storage + iCloud Storage > then Manage Storage.

For most of us storage miscreants, the biggest stuff is in four kinds: photos, messages, music and those apps that we all use.

Now, Guru magic time……………

Photos and videos are most likely your biggest problem. The obvious answer is uploading them to the cloud, like Google Photos or Apple Photos.  Next step,deleting them off the phone.

Try Apple Photos “Optimized iPhone Storage” setting (located in your iPhone settings, where else) that removes the originals from the phone after uploading to iCloud. Google Photos allows you to select “Free Up Space” to delete photos already backed up from the phone.

A faster, non-Cloud method, Guru recommends SanDisk’s iXpand USB drive. A 64GB model is $60.  Plug the drive into your iPhone, download the SanDisk app.  Then, move the photos to it. The USB drive can then connect to your Mac or PC for local storage, etc. 

Messages

Ai, yi, yi – old texts and message are real storage-suckers.  Save the important ones using the iMazing app on your PC or Mac (it’s $40), plug in your phone and the iMazing app goes to town to migrate your messages and saves them.  After saving, you should start manually deleting messages on your phone. The Guru says that a smarter approach is to go into Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and then delete messages that are a year or 30 days old.

Music

Apple Music lets you delete songs from your phone—without removing them from your music library.  Just go to Settings > General> Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage then select Music. Delete by artist, album or song by tapping in and swiping left. The Guru says – if you segregate your music by Playlist, just delete unwanted Playlists to pare things down. 

Third-Party Apps Files

If you are major app user, e.g. Twitter , Facebook and Snapchat, they tend to cache media to your phone. Twitter has a cache-cleaning option - go to the Me tab > Settings > Data Usage > Media Storage and clear it. 

Happy Operation iClean Sweep!