How To Add More Storage To An iPhone Or iPad
Can’t fit all your music, movies, documents and other stuff? Before you spend money on a higher-capacity iOS device, read this.
Rick Broida
Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET’s popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast . He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms .
Apple’s iDevices famously — make that infamously — rely on fixed storage. If you need more space, well, too bad.
Or maybe not. There are a few tricks you can try, starting with this weird one that seems to magically free up some otherwise unavailable space — anywhere from a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes. And if you’re a Facebook user, deleting the app in favor of your mobile browser can net you 500-600MB.
But if you’re seeking a really significant storage boost, your only option is to upgrade, right? You’ll need an iPhone or iPad with more space.
Tip #: Delete Burst Mode Photos
When you take photos in Burst Mode, your phone saves numerous almost identical images to create the burst effect. You almost certainly dont need all those identical photos. Delete the ones you dont need. If you want to make things even easier, you can simply turn off burst mode and only using it when absolutely necessary can save space on your phone.
A Better Alternative: Back Up Photos From iPhone To Computer With One Click
As you can see, by uploading photos from iPhone to iCloud, a substantial amount of iCloud storage is consumed. Since we only get 5 GB of free space on iCloud, most people have to buy a premium plan to get more storage. To avoid that, you can just use MobileTransas it can take an extensive backup of your iPhone data to your computer.
- ⢠MobileTrans â Backup is an extremely user-friendly application that can back up your photos, videos, audios, contacts, call logs, and so much more.
- ⢠You can take a backup of your iPhone data directly to your computer as many times as you want.
- ⢠The application will maintain different versions of your backup content, letting you restore any backup file to your device whenever you want.
- ⢠You can also use MobileTrans â Restore to extract the existing backup of MobileTrans or iTunes to the same or any other device.
- ⢠The tool is compatible with every major iOS device and does not need jailbreak access as well.
To take an extensive backup of your iPhone photos to your computer, you can just install MobileTrans â Backup and follow these steps:
Step 1: Launch the Backup tool
Firstly, just install MobileTrans on your system and launch it whenever you wish to back up your data. From the provided options on its home, you have to select the âBackup& Restoreâ module and go to Backup phone data.
Step 2: Select what you wish to back up
Step 3: Back up your data
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How To Optimize Your iPhone Photos
There are a couple of ways your iPhone can help you store photos more efficiently. First, if you have an iPhone 7 or later, you have the option to shoot all your photos in Apple’s new “High Efficiency” mode. Your image quality won’t be affected, but each photo takes significantly less space to store. This might be turned on already, but it bears double-checking.
1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap “Camera,” and then tap “Formats.”
3. Make sure that the camera capture mode is set to “High Efficiency.”
In addition, you can tell your phone to store lower resolution versions of your images on the device itself, but to be sure to keep the original full-resolution images in iCloud. You can save a lot of space this way â potentially gigabytes â but if you share images directly from your phone, you’ll be sharing lower-res versions, so this is admittedly a bit of a compromise. If you want to turn it on, do this:
1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap “General,” and then tap “iPhone Storage.”
3. To the right of “Optimize Photos,” tap “Enable.”
There’s more. If you take a lot of photos in the iPhone‘s HDR mode, you might be unwittingly saving two copies of each photo â the improved HDR photo, and the unretouched original, which you probably don’t need.
1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap “Camera.”
3. Turn off “Keep Normal Photo” by sliding the switch to the left.
Move Your Files To An Sd Card
If you use an iPhone or certain Android phones, this isnt an option. But if you have a phone with an SD card slot, feel free to be a digital pack rat and expand your available storage. Here are the and for Samsung Galaxys My Files app.
Just remember to set your phone to store your photos, videos, and music on the card, otherwise theyll end up on the phones internal storage, says Richard Fisco, who oversees electronics testing at Consumer Reports.
Apps can be moved to SD cards, too, but be careful, he warns.
Some apps you move will have their icon disappear from the home screen, though it will still appear in your app drawer, Fisco says. And many app widgets wont work if you move the app to an SD card.
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Can I Add More Gb To My iPhone
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Find out how to fix the iPhone storage problem below:
How To Buy More Storage On iPhone
If, after youve cleaned up everything on your iPhone, you still need more storage, dont worry there are a couple of options:
- External hard drive: Now that iOS supports files, you can connect to an external drive to save documents and files taking up a lot of space on your phone.
- Cloud storage: A couple of photo cloud services were mentioned earlier in this article, but you can also store other file types in the cloud by using services like iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
When it comes to cleaning up your iPhone storage, its easy to feel overwhelmed and frustrated. But, as this article has hopefully shown, there are many options available to help you clear up some space. That way, you can get back to using your phone for the things you love to do, like capturing amazing pictures and incredible videos.
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Option : Move Storage To Icloud
Something to cheer about is iCloud storage, which enables you to store pictures and videos and other valuable information. As the world advances in technology, so does picture and video quality advances. In turn, this will occupy more space but this is when iCloud comes in handy.
You can move your pictures and videos to automatic save on clouds by using the Apple photos it is quite similar to the google photos app Heres how to turn on the apple photos
- Open settings
How To Delete Non
Under the iPhone storage graph, you should see all your apps listed in order from largest to smallest. What you’re seeing isn’t just the size of the app itself, but also how much space its data takes up as well.
This varies greatly from app to app the Music app is only about 20MB by itself, for example, but if you have a lot of songs on your phone, this app could be taking up many gigabytes of space.
To check, tap on an app in the list on the iPhone Storage page. You’ll see the app’s details page, where you can choose to delete the app and all of its data or just offload the app from the iPhone temporarily.
- “Offload App” removes the app from your phone but leaves all of its data behind. If you reinstall it later, the data will still be there and you can continue using it normally. This is a good option if you plan to use the app again later, and the app itself is very large but the data takes up very little space. A good example of this is Google Maps â the app is about 124MB, but its data is probably just a few megabytes.
- “Delete App” deletes the app and all of its data. This is a good choice if the app’s data is much larger than the app itself, so there’s little advantage to deleting just the app â like Spotify, if you download a lot of music, or the Music app itself.
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Tip #1: Clean Up Your Notes
While your Notes app wont show up under the Storage Usage list mentioned above, the more notes you have, the more they pile up taking precious storage on your phone. This is potentially one of the least-impactful ways to free up space, as most notes do not use much memory but it will force you to clean out the old and unnecessary notes you no longer need, and that will help free up at least a little space if youre desperate.
How To Remove Offline Content In Netflix Youtube And Apple Music
Another of the usual suspects for wasted storage on your iPhone is content you might have downloaded to watch or listen to offline.
Heres how to simultaneously get rid of movies and TV shows youve downloaded in the Netflix app:
If youve downloaded videos in the YouTube app, you can follow these steps to delete all of them at one time:
Because Apple Music is native to iOS, youll actually be able to remove all of your downloaded songs from the Settings app. Just follow the steps below:
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Take Screenshots And Compress Videos
You definitely would have captured so many pictures and videos which consume lots of space on your iPhone.
As you know iPhones captured image consumes lots of device space. In that case, you can easily take a screenshot of that image which you dont want to delete. Because the screenshot will only consume around 20% of the space compared to the actual image.
You can do the same for the PDF files also.
If you have a video in which you only need a specific part then you can trim the video and remove unwanted parts using the default editing tools.
In case you want to keep the complete video then you can send the video to yourself on WhatsApp. And as you might be aware that WhatsApp compresses the videos so your videos will be compressed and will take far lesser space.
Most of the times iPhone has a storage problem because of its fixed memory and no support for external memory card slot. Even though Apple Inc. increased the internal memory in their latest iPhone 8 and iPhone X, still for some users it might not be enough. For such users, these easy hacks will be very effective in getting more storage space on their iPhone.
Do you use any other method to increase iPhone storage which we didnt cover here? Tell us in the comments down below.
What Is Other Storage Anyway
Your iPhone Storage menu will divide that bar up top into familiar categories like Apps, Media, Photos, and Mail, but also an Other category that is sometimes very large. Its common for Other to be in the 5-20GB range, but if its way over 20GB, it has probably grown out of control. You can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the app list where you will see iOS and System Data listed. Tap on System Data to see how much Other System Data is taking up.
The Other category is big and varied, because its a real catch-all category. Its comprised of system caches, logs, Siri voices , updates, and so much more. One of the biggest culprits for Other growing out of hand is streaming lots of music and video. When you video or music from the iTunes store, TV app, or Music app, its indexed as Media. But streams have caches used to ensure smooth playback, and those are categorized as Other.
Safaris caches can start to grow pretty large, too. And if you send tons of texts with images or video, the caches for that can start to fill up a lot of space.
Your iPhone is supposed to manage these caches to keep your storage from becoming completely full, but it doesnt always do a great job.
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What Does Other Mean In iPhone Storage
The Other category consists of temporary files that the iOS does not recognize and cannot put into the standard categories. Other content consists of files like downloaded email attachments and web browsing caches. The Other category also includes device settings, Siri voices, voiceover data, and system files.
If you want to free up space on your iPhone, heres how to delete all that other storage:
Do Not Keep Both Photos When Using Hdr
Your phone is able to capture better photos when using the HDR mode. This mode is most effective when bright lights and shadows are present. You can choose to keep the normal photo with the HDR if you desire. So make sure you are not keeping the normal photo as the new iPhones are capable of capturing better images in HDR mode.
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Wireless External Hard Drives For Your iPhone
The third option for adding storage to your iPhone is a Wi-Fi-connected hard drive. Not all external hard drives with Wi-Fi features can be used with your iPhonelook for one that specifically touts iPhone support. When you find one, you can add hundreds of gigabytes, or even terabytes, of storage to your phone. Before you buy, there are two things to consider:
On the plus side, an external hard drive is more versatile because it can also be used with a Mac or PC, so you can get double duty out of this kind of hard drive.
Not sure what hard drive is best for you? Learn about our picks for great hard drives in The 9 Best External Hard Drives.
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Clear Out Your Web Browser Cache
You can always try cleaning out your web browser cache if you’re really scrounging for space, although deleting apps and media will make a much bigger difference. But doing so could give your iPhone a bit of a speed boost when web browsing, so it’s worth trying if you’re low on storage and are experiencing sluggish browser performance. But just remember that it will sign you out of websites you’ve logged into.
Open Settings, choose Safari and tap Clear History and Website Data.
Clear out your Safari cache to see a performance boost and save a little space.
If you use tap the three dots at the bottom of the screen, choose History and tap Clear Browsing Data. You should see a check mark next to three categories: Browsing History, Cookies, Site Data and Cached Images and Files. If you want to only delete browsing data for a certain time period, tap the Time Range option near the top of the screen before hitting Clear Browsing Data at the bottom.
You can also clear your Google Chrome cache easily within the app.
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Turn On Icloud Photos Or Use Google Photos
If you dont want to delete your photos, you can use the iCloud Photos feature instead. It uploads all your photos to iCloud, and when youre running out of storage space, it automatically deletes older photos and videos from your device.
The problem is the iCloud free tier only gives you 5 GB of storage space. To upload more than that, you have to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts at $0.99 per month for 50 GB.
To enable iCloud Photos, open the Settings app, go to the Photos section, and toggle-on the iCloud Photos option. From the options below, select Optimize iPhone/iPad Storage.
If you dont want to pay for cloud storage, and you dont mind backing up photos in a compressed resolution, try the app. You can upload all photos from your Camera Roll to your Google account. Once uploaded, you can delete all photos from your iPhone or iPad with just a tap using Google Photos.