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There are few things more frustrating in the life of an iPhone user than encountering that little reminder that you are almost out of storage. If you’re like a lot of people, you probably rush to delete a million photos and videos you have stored on your device. And while this will help free up storage, it isn’t always the ideal solution (especially if you have not backed up your device and risk losing all of those precious memories). This is the secret hack people are using to create storage on their iPhones without deleting photos.
Downloading a large file is the last thing you’ll probably think of doing if your phone is short on space. But, believe it or not, downloading a free app that requires over 1 GB can prompt your phone to free up storage space.
When iOS determines that your phone doesn’t have enough space for the app, it actually begins to clear up space on your device to make room for it. If, for example, you have iCloud enabled, it will automatically upload images to iCloud before deleting them on your device. As a result, your phone will gain back storage space — and you can simply stop the download or delete the app once downloading is complete.
If this hack doesn’t get the job done, it may be time to devote a little more attention to some well-known storage hogs (don’t worry, you will still be able to keep your photos). Before you delete a photo or video, consider getting rid of something you will probably miss a lot less: old text messages. Many of us have tons of texts stored on our phones, all of which eat up valuable storage space.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go through your texts one by one to delete them. Instead, open Settings and go to Messages. Scroll down to Message History, tap Keep Messages, and choose 30 days. This will get rid of messages that are older than one month. With this out of the way, you can go back into your texts and manually delete the ones that no longer serve you.
If these hacks and actions still aren’t cutting it, you may want to consider paying to upgrade your storage space. Shelling out money may hurt at first, but it will be worth it in the end — especially if it means never encountering that “Storage Almost Full” pop-up again.
