Your iPhone storage is always full — and you’re beyond annoyed. You’ve already deleted as many accidental photos you shot of your foot or thumb, have moved a bunch over to iCloud, and did the hard work of deleting photos and videos from your phone — and, still, storage woes plague you. Or maybe you have zero interest in touching the photos and videos on your phone and would like a solution that doesn’t involve what you consider such a harsh step. That’s fair, too.
But something’s got to give when it comes to your phone and its storage. You’re going to have to make changes to gain back storage space, but you don’t have to suffer in the process. If your storage is always full, here are some ways to free it up without deleting photos.
Clear Your Cache
Clearing your phone browser’s cache is a simple and effective way to free up storage and get your phone moving more efficiently. To do this, go to Settings > your browser > select Clear History and Website Data. Simple to do — but try and do it frequently.
Disable Live Photos
We promised you wouldn’t have to delete photos and videos to free up storage, but we didn’t say you wouldn’t have to play with the settings a bit. This will be painless: turn off Live Photos by going to the Camera icon > Preserve Settings > toggle Live Photos off.
Delete Apps You Don’t Use
Admit it: you haven’t played Words with Friends in years. It’s time to delete all of the old apps that are just sitting on your phone, taking up space. Not only have these apps likely not been updated in forever, which can put your phone at risk for viruses, but they could be resource-intensive apps that take, take, take — without giving anything back if you’re not actually using them. Delete them — you won’t miss them.
Delete Old Text Messages
The same rule applies to old text messages as it does to old apps you don’t use: once you’ve read and responded to them, hanging onto them just takes from your storage space. Making a point of setting your texts to delete after a certain number of days, like 30 days, can make sure your phone automatically gets rid of the old texts without you having to remember to delete them.
