How To: Free up space on your iPhone

If you have a 16GB iPhone and take a lot of photos on it, you’re bound to run out of space.

I used to get the ‘not enough space’ message on my camera roll quite often, as I’m about to take a photo.

The easy fix for photos is to just transfer them onto your laptop/desktop, or if you have a Mac, just use Image Capture to transfer images within seconds to your hard drive. I have an iPhone folder for this. Once I transfer the images, I just delete them off my phone. Only takes less than a minute.

But, it’s not just photos that take up space. If you’ve been using your iPhone for years, have you taken a look at “manage storage”? The first time I went into mine a couple of months ago, I noticed Instagram was well over 3GB and Facebook was over 2GB (this is the result of browsing at any time of the day on uncapped internet).

So, to bring down the gigabytes into megabytes, just go into Settings > Usage > Manage Storage (edit: for iOS 8 and above)

Inside Manage Storage, see which apps are taking the most space (usually social networks that you browse daily; all the data adds up over time). You then need to delete these apps and reinstall them. I’ve done it with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/Tweetbot.

Now all the GBs are MBs, which I did a couple of week ago (I’ve since switched from the US App Store to the South African one):

Other ways I’ve freed up space:
– Deleted games (I only have Bejewelled Blitz on my phone) because battery life > games
– Removed old magazines I’ve read (Zinio, MySubs)
– Delete TV series immediately after watching them via CineXPlayer
– Since I started streaming music, I’ve removed the amount of albums on my phone in favour of offline playlists/albums via Simfy.