How To Clear Storage On iPhone

Manage Your Icloud Storage

Need more iCloud storage? You can easily make space or upgrade to iCloud+.

When you set up iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of storage. You can use that space for your iCloud backups, to keep your photos and videos stored in iCloud Photos, to keep your documents up to date in iCloud Drive, and more. You can always check how much iCloud storage you’re using in Settings on your device or on iCloud.com. If you’re running low, you can make more space or upgrade to iCloud+ any time.

Not sure about the difference between the storage capacity that comes with your device and iCloud storage? Learn more about device storage and iCloud storage.

Clear Other Storage On iPhone

When youre checking out how much storage youve used on your iPhone, you might notice a gray section labeled Other. This generic category acts as a catch-all for miscellaneous files that dont fall within a standard grouping. These include your Safari cache, Message attachments, or downloaded content from various streaming apps.

Move Your Photos And Videos To Cloud Storage

After youve cleaned up your photo library, the next thing youll want to do is upload your pictures to a cloud storage service like iCloud or Google Photos. Both will allow you to move your high-quality photos and videos while keeping a smaller copy on your phone to help conserve storage.

Heres how you move your photos to iCloud:

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Deleting Cached Data On Apps

Apple doesnt make deleting cached data on your apps very easy. The fastest method is to delete and then reinstall apps that take up a lot of space. When you reinstall a deleted app, youll need any relevant login credentials, like names and passwords, so before deleting apps.

You’ll then need to visit the App Store to reinstall the deleted app. If you have a handful of apps that use a lot of data, its worth it to open those apps to see if there are in-app settings that you can enable that will clear the cached data automatically.

Turn Off Background App Refresh & Location Data

You can prevent Other Storage from accumulating by turning off background refresh for your apps and by restricting your iPhones location services. When an app refreshes in the background, it creates a cache data file. Likewise, when you share your location with an app, that data is stored in Other Storage. You can control both your app refresh and location data through the Settings app.

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Clear App Cache And Other App Data

Unlike browsers, most apps dont give you access to their cache and other data they store, such as login data. And if you tap on each app at the top of that list in iPhone Storage, youll notice it has several gigabytes of so-called Documents and Data. Heres how you clear that app data to get more iPhone storage:

Yup, unfortunately, this is the only way to clear cache and other app data for the majority of apps.

Delete Photos And Videos In Messages

Do you send a lot of photos or videos in Messages? Well, guess what? They’re hogging up precious storage on your phone, most likely as duplicates that you already have saved in your Photos app.

You’ll have to manually go into each conversation and then long-press on the photo or video. Tap “More…” on the menu box window that pops up, select each photo , and then tap the trash can icon in the lower left. Click “Delete Message” to confirm and, boom, they’re gone.

If you’re on iOS 11, there’s an easier method to clear these attachments that doesn’t require so much manual work. Just go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and scroll down “Review Large Attachments” and tap it. Now, you’ll get a whole list of all the attachments you sent in Messages. Tap “Edit” and select all the ones you want to trash and you’re good to go.

And if you’re on an iPhone X and have sent a lot of Animoji, you may as well delete the ones you don’t need as well. They’re sent and saved as video files, and you definitely don’t want a bunch of this crap clogging up your phone storage.

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The Ios 13 Storage Problem

If you have an iOS device running iOS 13 or iPadOS 13, and your Other storage is out of control, you may be experiencing a bug. Apple has noted that an issue in iOS and iPadOS 13 may prevent the system from automatically freeing up storage. Updating your device to iOS or iPadOS 13.6.1 or later may fix the problem. Follow our guide on updating your iPhone for more information on obtaining the latest version of iOS.

From Here It’s Basically All About Deleting Stuff

Your iPhone will give you a couple recommendations at the top to potentially make things easier on you. Apple will also try to sell you iCloud storage here, or make use of the storage you have but may not be using.

Referring back to the photo of my storage space above, my phone’s primary recommendation is to enable iCloud Photos. Tapping “Enable” will “Automatically upload and safely store all your photos and videos in iCloud so you can browse, search, and share from any of your devices” and it will clear up almost 16 GB of storage . This would almost immediately solve my storage problem considering my photos take up perhaps the biggest chunk of storage on my phone.

My phone’s other recommendation is to Auto Delete Old Conversationsfrom my text messages. According to my storage overview, my messages are taking up over 8 GB of space. If I enable the Auto Delete Old Conversations option, my phone will get rid of “all messages and attachments that were sent or received over 1 year ago.” This would clear up about 5.5 GB in my storage another decently sized chunk of space.

But consider here: maybe you want some of those old messages, including any photos or videos someone may have sent you long ago.

Once you decide whether to enable your iPhone’s recommendations or not, you can scroll down, going app by app deciding which stuff to keep and which stuff to get rid of.

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What Is Other On iPhone

On the storage page, you have several categories like Apps, Media, Mail, Photos, Messages, etc. Now, anything that does not fit these predefined categories may fall under Other. In iOS 15, it seems to be renamed System Data.

Apple mentions that Other contains non-removable mobile assets. This includes things like Siri voices, dictionaries, offline translation languages, fonts, dictionaries, Spotlight index, local Keychain data, CloudKit Database, logs and caches, and more.

Caches include things like streaming songs and videos data, Safari cache, etc. All these are reflected as Other in system storage.

Backup Erase And Restore

This is the ultimate and the most effective solution to delete Other storage on iPhone. So if you are looking to free space now, you can go this route.

But please understand that after you set up your iPhone, you will want to use Siri, which will download Siris voice. You will set up Keychain, dictation, etc., which will grow the size of system data. But for the time being, if Other occupies several GBs, erasing your device is a sure shot way to free up this space.

If you decide to erase your iPhone, make sure you back it up to iCloud. After that, you may erase the device and then restore the backup.

Once again, though restoring the backup will bring all your apps and data, but it can be time-consuming. Plus, if you are not tech-savvy, I would recommend you skip this step. Just keep restarting your phone every 3-7 days, make sure you are always on the latest version of iOS, and periodically clear unwanted apps, images, videos, voice memos, etc. If you follow these, you need not worry much about the Other data. Your iPhone will handle it automatically.

I hope this brief guide helped you understand what Other on iPhone is, how to see how much space it is taking on your iPhone, and how to get rid of it. If you need help freeing more local storage, we have a dedicated guide showing you how to free up space on iPhone and iPad.

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Empty Your Browser’s Cache

Another smidgen of junk to wipe off your iPhone or iPad is the cache for the Safari web browser or other mobile web browsers you use. For Safari, go to Settings > Safari. Tap Clear History and Website Data.

For Chrome on iOS, open the app, tap the three dots on the bottom-right corner and select History. Then tap Clear Browsing Data to wipe everything out or Edit to erase specific sites. You can also navigate to Settings > Privacy > Clear Browsing Data, which will let you delete browsing history, cookies and site data, cached images and files, saved passwords, and autofill dataor everything at once. For more, read How to Clear Your Cache on Any Browser.

Use iPhone Optimized Feature To Clear Storage

Your photos eat up more storage on your iPhone, and therefore, iPhone comes with the Optimize feature. This iPhone optimizes features automatically to help you to optimize your iCloud space. The iPhone comes with a feature that optimizes your storage by deleting the repeated albums or pictures on your storage. This feature also decreases the high resolution to normal and saved the originals on your phone.

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Q: How Can I Check The Other Storage On My iPhone

On your iPhone:

Open “Settings” on iPhone. Select “General” > “iPhone Storage“, then you’ll see a bar graph showing all your iPhone storage occupy, and the lightgrey one would be “Other” storage.

Through iTunes:

Connect your iPhone to a PC or a Mac, then open the iTunes app. Next, click the “Summary” option, you will see the “Storage” section. Move the mouse pointer on the yellow part and then you will find out how much space is consumed by “Other” storage on your iPhone.

Learn How To Clear Other Storage On Your iPhone And Free Up Space

The mysterious “Other” category in your iPhone storage can be a real pain when your iPhone storage is full and you need to clear up space for an iOS update or to install a new app. We’ll cover what Other Storage means and how to delete Other Storage on the iPhone or iPad to free up space. Read on to learn how to find, delete, and manage the Other Storage category so that you can do more on your iPhone.

• Turn Off Background App Refresh & Location Data

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Check Your Photo And Video Use

The Photos app often takes up a lot more space than people realize, so let’s deal with that app directly. Under Settings > General > Storage, find Photos to see how much storage it’s using. If you have more than 1GB here, you should consider copying photos and videos to a cloud storage service so you can delete them from your device.

If you have a Google account, an easy option here is . Download the app, sign in, and tap your account icon on the top right. Select Google Photos Settings > Back up & sync and toggle Back Up & Sync to on. Make sure Google Photos has access to Photos and then, every photo you take with your device will be automatically backed up to Google Photos when you’re online and accessible across your devices and on the web.

Google used to offer unlimited photo storage via Google Photos, but that deal is dead, so plan accordingly as photo and video uploads count against your Google account storage. If you’re a Prime member, Amazon Photos still offers unlimited uploads here are a few more alternatives.

You can also choose to keep lower-resolution photos on your phone while allowing the full-resolution ones to remain in iCloud. Go to Settings > Photos > Optimize iPhone Storage and make sure it has a checkmark next to it.

How To Clear Space On Your iPhone Without Deleting Photos

As an iPhone user, theres nothing worse than the dreaded Storage Almost Full notification that pops up on your phone at the most inconvenient time.

It usually appears when youre in the middle of recording a video or when youre trying to snap a quick photo: Cannot Take Photo: There is not enough available storage to take a photo.

And while many people are quick to delete their precious memories on the spot — without spending the time to back up their Camera Rolls, theres an easier way.

Here are 7 tips to save space without deleting a single photo from your Camera Roll:

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Let Your iPhone Manage Storage For You

Your iPhone is smart enough to manage software for you, and can automatically remove apps you don’t use often to make room. I usually leave this option off because I want to know when an app is deleted first, but this is a smart way for your iPhone to manage its own storage. To turn it on:

• Open “Settings.”

• Now go to “Your Library” on the bottom-right.
• Move through your albums and playlists with green icons showing they’ve been downloaded.
• Tap an album you want to delete.
• Toggle the “Downloaded” button to off.

Delete Old Imessage And Mail Data

If youre a heavy texter, the Messages app might be filling up your storage with a lot of data. You may want to change your Messages settings to save fewer old messages.

Messages is set to keep messages forever by default, but you can to change it to 1 Year or even 30 Days to minimize the amount of data that the Messages app caches.

To do this, open Settings and tap the Messages app from the default apps section. Scroll down to the Message History section and tap Keep Messages. Next, select your preferred message storage duration: 30 Days or 1 Year.

Image Gallery

Also, when you use the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, it saves a cache of all the documents, photos, and videos you’ve viewed. This makes reloading them the second time faster. However, they can also quickly pile up and take up precious storage space.

You can clear out obsolete Mail caches by deleting and re-entering your email account details.

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How To Find Out How Much Space You Have Left On An iPhone

The first thing you need to do is determine exactly how much space you have left.

1. Open the Settings app.

2. Tap “General,” and then tap “iPhone Storage.”

3. You may need to wait a few moments, but you should see a graph at the top of the screen displaying how much free space you have and what’s using up your memory .

What Is Other Storage Section On The iPhone

Basically, the Other category on your iPhone or iPad is where your caches, settings, saved messages, voice memos, andwell, any other miscellaneous data is stored. These files are usually too small to have separate categories, so your iPhone or iPad groups them all together in the Other folder.

This means there’s no straightforward way to identify and delete the contents of the Other folder, but well show you a few tips to deal with this problem.

Before we begin, lets briefly look at how to view your iPhone storage to learn whether Other data is taking up significant space.

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How To Delete Other Storage On Your iPhone

Unlike the apps, media, photos, and messages categories, the Other category is a lot less straightforward. You wont be able to see what items comprise this category in the iPhone Storage menu.