How To Free Up Space On iPhone and iPad?

how to free up space on iphone

Filled up storage is a major headache. Whether we are trying to download an application from the App Store, or trying to capture something amusing, if there is not enough storage space on your iPhone or iPad, it will not let you peacefully download anything, or let you take photos, does it?

Well, since it is a headache, we have the antidote right in our hands!

Clearing up storage and making space on your iPhone and iPad can be done in many ways! Some of them being very different from the others, as there are multiple types of data that are eating up those 64/128/256 GigaBytes (or even that TeraByte, if considering an iPad) of yours.

So let’s start with today’s guide, which tells us how to free up space on our iPhone and iPads.


How To Free Up Space On iPhone and iPad?

To account for space on the latest devices like phones and tablets and laptops, there are multiple reasons, one the very common being our own media, like files, images, videos, games, etc.

We can fill them up with our own estimation as being aware of how much storage they eat up at once. But there are some more things that work in the background usually and do not let us know when they rise up in those byte counts.

Such space eaters are our application data, cache, temporary data, etc. So how do we deal with them? First, let us find out how and where our storage has been occupied.


1. Analyze Storage Settings

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to cut a tree, I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. We might spend some time first analyzing the storage too. To know what is occupying our storage, we need to open the settings of our iPhone or the iPad.

We can simply do that by locating the settings icon on our home screen, which looks like this.

how to free up space on iphone

Once in the settings, go to the “Generals” tab.

In the general tab, you will find the Storage options. It will show you how much of the total storage is used and how much is unused. Now usually anywhere up to 1GB and more of unused storage is usually fine for having normal usage on your iPhone or iPad.

Since we now know how much free space we have and how much we want, we can now proceed to further steps of clearing up space.


2. Manage Storage

In the storage settings section in the general tab, you will find the option that says “Manage Storage”. Using this option, you can check which of your apps is using how much space. You can also see how much of your photos and videos and audios are taking space.

how to free up space on iphone

Now that we know where the problem is, let us start with the cleaning.


3. Multimedia

The photos and video captured/shot from your iPhone or iPad can be pretty bulky sometimes. Since we do not watch them all the time, neither can afford to lose them, we should always have a backup option, that is, to transfer them either onto our laptop or upload them into the cloud services.

Now if we have iTunes and our other devices are Apple too, like laptops for Macbook, iTunes sharing would work perfectly fine, but if we have a windows laptop, we might want to try some other ways to transfer and clear up space on our iPhones and iPads.

One of the methods is using the USB cable. Since our iPhones and iPads use USB Type C nowadays, we can simply use a USB 3.0 to USB Type C cable, or a charging cable without its power brick, to transfer our data from mobile devices to a computer.

Once we have backed up our photos and videos from iPhones and iPads to our higher storage devices like laptops, computers and external hard drives, we can safely delete them from our phones and have plenty of free storage space.


4. Delete Unwanted Apps

Enthusiastically we can download a lot of applications on our devices like iPhones and iPads, and eventually not use them all. So it is a really good idea to go through your phone, look at all the applications and uninstall whichever ones we are not going to use/ or have a very rare usage for.

To delete apps from your iPhones and iPads, simply find the app that you want to delete, long tap on it till a tab pops up showing options to uninstall.

how to free up space on iphone


5. Clear Cache

Like we talked about earlier, app data, and cache can be eating up a lot of space in your device without even knowing. So let’s roll towards settings again to throw the bags of cache out of our iPhones and iPads.

Again in the storage settings, you will find the applications tab, once you tap on it, you will see all the apps. Whichever apps you see with having a lot of storage on the device, you can click on it and select the “offload” option to clear the unnecessary data off it.

You can also use the delete app option here to remove completely the applications that you do not need.

how to free up space on iphone

One more option you can find in the settings is to automatically offload the apps, which you can enable.

6. Clear Trash

The photos and content you delete from the gallery often get loaded up in the trash. Using the photos app to clean them out. They suck up the same amount of images as when they were in the gallery itself.


Conclusion

As much as using our iPhones and iPads gives us entertainment, that much hectic it could be when they fall into trouble. Well worry not, with our detailed easy to go guides, you will never face a problem that can not be solved.

At the end with that, we today cleared out our useless storage data and cache and whatnot stuff that causes loaded up storage in our iPhones and iPads, and eventually, found out, how to free up space on iPhone and iPad!

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