Storage full on a phone
Go after the few enormous things that are actually filling a phone, and say exactly which of them is safe to remove and which is not.
"Storage almost full" is a message about the size of a shelf. It is not a message about how tidy you are.
A phone bought in 2019 with 64 gigabytes of room has, by now, four or five years of photographs on it. Photographs from a modern phone are about three megabytes each, so a thousand of them is three gigabytes — and video is the real weight. One minute of video is around one hundred megabytes, so a five-minute clip of the grandchildren costs as much room as a hundred and fifty photographs.
Key points
- Explain why a phone fills up, in numbers rather than blame
- Find the enormous things first, instead of deleting a thousand small ones
- Tell a sync from a backup, and know what deleting does to each
- Use Offload or Free up space to keep the picture and lose the weight
What to remember
- Sort by size, not by how untidy something feels. Four videos usually beat four thousand messages.
- To free room without losing anything, use "Offload" or "Free up space" — that removes the copy from the phone and keeps the one in the cloud.
- Two questions, in order: is there another copy, and can it be fetched again for nothing? Two yeses mean it can go.
Try this
On your phone, find Settings, then Storage — General and then iPhone Storage on an iPhone. Do not delete anything yet. Read the list from the top: the first three lines are where all the room went, and they are rarely what people expect.
Practice: Storage full on a phone. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.