How to Manage the Storage on Your iPhone
How to Check Your iPhone Storage
Before you can start making any changes, it is prudent to know exactly where you stand and how much memory you have used, and how much do you have left?
You can easily check the storage status of your iPhone storage. To get started, open up the Settings application and go over to General > iPhone Storage.
At the top of the screen, you will see a colorful bar that has a category-by-category breakdown of what feature or app that is using up your storage space.
What you see in that bar should help to guide your next steps.
How to Manage Storage for Apps on iPhone
In iOS 11, you can control your storage for individual apps in a more grand way than ever before. Offloading an application will delete that application from your phone, but it would keep the application documents and data. This would make it to be quickly available if you ever decide to re-download the app again.
For applications that store data in the cloud such as Gmail and OneDrive, it might not make much difference in doing that. However, if you use a lot of local applications like games and other productivity software, it is a great way to reactively manage your device storage without losing your data permanently.
To offload applications on a one-by-one basis, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Next, scroll down to the list of apps and tap on the one you want to offload. Once the information screen opens, tap on Offload App
Optionally, if you want your iPhone to offload applications automatically when you get close to the storage limit, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and click on Enable next to Offload Unused Apps.
How to Manage your Photo and Video Storage on an iPhone
When it comes to managing the storage of your photos on your iPhone, there are a few options.
To see what is available, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and click on the Photos app.
You will see three options:
- iCloud Photo Library
- “Recently Deleted” Album
- Review Personal Videos
For each of the three entries, your phone would tell you how much space you can save.
The first option is the iCloud Photo Library which will automatically save all your photos into the cloud and delete them from your device.
The second option will remove all old photos that are in your Recently Deleted album. This will save you a lot of space if you find yourself mostly deleting tons of memes and other clutter.
While the third option is for you to review the videos that you recorded yourself
Use a Third-Party App to Manage your iPhone Storage
You can also use third-party applications to manage the storage on your iPhone. Here are two of my favorites:
1. iExplorer
iExplorer lets you move content from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod into a Mac or PC by using drag and drop. It is a great way to manage the storage across lots of different file formats without ever needing to modify with each one on a format-by-format basis.
Not only does this work with music, photos, and videos, but it also lets you manage the storage that Is used by content such as contacts, voicemails, reminders, calendar events, notes, and many more.
2. iMazing
iMazing sells itself as a Backup and Restore application which is better than Apple’s native backup tools, but you can also use it to manage your iPhone’s storage.
The application works with backups, photos, music, ebooks, messages, contacts, and other applications. You can move your content into a Mac or PC and delete it from your phone’s storage.
