The One iMessage Setting You Should Turn Off ASAP Because It Takes Up So Much Storage
March 24, 2025 by Lisa Cupido
Your iMessages add up — and it doesn’t take a long time to go from enough storage to dangerously close to no storage left. There are few things as annoying as having to scramble to figure out how to gain back storage space. You find yourself deleting photos and videos like your life depends on it, or even getting rid of apps you’d really rather not because they are too resource-intensive to justify keeping them.
One of the best ways you can avoid having to quickly find ways to save storage space is by performing regular maintenance on your phone — this includes paying attention to iMessages. Simple things like attachments in your iMessages quickly take up storage space on your phone. Even worse: once you open a message and read it, you probably forgot about it and don’t think to go back to it and delete anything for the sake of storage. Here’s the one iMessage setting that you can turn off ASAP because it takes up so much storage.
Automatic Downloads
Auto download for attachments is an iPhone setting that automatically downloads attachments that you are sent — like videos and images. Since these attachments take up a considerable amount of storage space on your phone, it is obvious that they are going to accumulate on your phone and clog your device — eventually affecting its performance and possibly slowing it down.
What can you do about this? You can actually turn off this setting and save your phone storage space.
How To Turn Off Auto Downloads
To disable auto download in your iPhone mail messenger, go to Settings > Mail > Data Settings > turn of Automatic Downloads.
You can also disable automatic download for apps like WhatsApp and your Gmail account. For the latter, head to Gmail > tap on the three lines in the top corner > scroll to Settings > Data Usage > turn off Auto-download attachments.