Do you keep getting a popup on your beloved iPhone to free up space or to upgrade your iCloud storage? I am sure many of you experience this including me and this is utterly irritating. Deleting the photos and apps can free up space but iCloud keeps backing up and your storage always gets full very quickly. Are you frustrated with your iPhone always lacking space? Are you constantly trying to upgrade your software but in vain due to less storage Here are some hacks to free up space on your iPhone:
STOP BACKING UP TEXT MESSAGES
If you text often on your iPhone, your text messages probably are eating up a substantial amount of your storage space. By default, messages are set to be saved forever in iOS 9 and above, but you can change that to one year or 30 days which is super easy. Go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and select the desired length of time.
STOP USING PHOTO STREAM
You must have seen something called as ‘Photo Stream’ in your albums. It is actually a section wherein your last 1000 pictures are auto saved and this can be of 1 GB or even more. You basically need photo stream when you have more than one apple devices and want to share pictures. Photo stream will basically save your pictures on all the devices and will leave no room for free space. Simply go to Settings> Photos and camera and switch off the ‘My Photo Stream’ option.
MORE: Ways to back up your phone.
USE HDR SMARTLY
Ok. So all the iPhone users out there, you must have used the HDR while clicking pictures. If you have always used HDR for clicking your pictures, there is a possibility of your storage being full because of your over loaded pictures. HDR saves 2 pictures at a time, like the normal one and HDR one, so if you check; you will have 2 copies of 1 image. Delete all the normal pictures and keep the HDR. You may also go to Settings>Photos and camera and switch off the ‘Keep Normal Photo’ option.
ERASE YOUR BROWSER DATA
Just like your computer and laptop, your iPhone too saves the cookies and browsing data that can eat up your storage. It is necessary to clear the cache and cookies to free up some space on your phone. If you are using safari and want to free up the data, go to manage storage> Safari app> Website data and remove all the website data. Make sure you do this regularly in order to prevent it from taking away your storage space.
UNINSTALL APPS YOU DON’T USE
We often tend to download/install apps we find interesting and keep loading our iPhone. If you check your phone, you will find a lot of apps you don’t really need and also a lot of games which you played initially but found it boring and forgot about it. These apps and games continue to be on your phone and occupy precious space. Consider uninstalling the apps that you no longer need. Simply long press an app, you will see all the icons shaking with a cross mark on them; you can delete the app by pressing the cross mark.
SHUT DOWN ICLOUD
iCloud keeps backing up your phone data and you keep getting a popup saying iCloud storage is full and consider freeing up some space! This happens with me all the time so I simply signed out of iCloud (not Apple or iTunes, just iCloud) so that I don’t backup anything. You can anytime sign in and manually back up from time to time. This is something I do and don’t get any popups anymore.