How to Free Up Storage Space on iPhone and iPad

[contacos]

Still blows my mind all these years later that there still isn’t a delete all button to delete all photos stored in messages. So annoying having to tap them all one by one in a endless list of photos like you can’t even swipe down to at least select them all rather quickly

 

[Neepman]

I've never seen a proper explanation for "other" but then I've never seen an explanation why there is no icloud app so you dont have do dump all your apple mail on the device just to have mail at all. Of course the explanation for both is to make it difficult to work with the first tier of storage capacity so you have to spend more at purchase.

 

[Anthony Sullivan]

What is this, CNET?

 

[whsbuss]

So why is there no native tool to delete the Other Data listed at the bottom of the storage screen. Mine is as large as the System data.

 

[AppleTO]

I do a clean install of the new major version of iOS each year. This way the “other” category always stays minimal and any bugs that occur from upgrading aren’t present. If you use mostly cloud storage, I highly recommend it.

Edit: I also use this time for app cleanup of apps I’ve downloaded and forgotten about.

 

[mymacrumorsname]

I'v never needed more than 32GB of storage, never got close to running out, I'm a developer been using Mac and iOS for years since the 90s and never once had a storage issue so guess it's down to the average consumer going wild and not after a month or 2 weeks go threw and delete unwanted unused data and any photos not viewed or used backed up on external storage and online storage

Same. I can't figure out how to use more than 20 GB. But I admit that I do make use of iCloud (more than 300GB).

 

[RealMonster]

And regarding other posts, yes, $0.99 for 50gb may sound like a decent deal, but considering the quality of camera they are putting out in the phones and the device's storage options, 50gb its a sad joke guys come on, even for $0.99!

Unless you want to throw your money at Apple desperately, your best bet with photos is to pick a device with high storage and store locally without iCloud. When it's full, offload via image capture.
Don't get me wrong, it still depends on having a mac, image capture is a buggy dinosaur with zero love from Apple likely to be phased out, it will still mess your storage specially with heic to jpg conversion and take forever, but still better than any of the iCloud plans except the more expensive one (which is still ridiculous but space amount is decent for today's use).

I HAVE the 2GB iCloud family plan. And that's great, but apps still take up space on the device. iCloud storage is good for photos, but the reality is that management of data on the device is completely worthless. That's what's so infuriating. There are just some things that you can't avoid having on-board, and Apple will gamely throw up a little prompt telling you to get rid of some of it and then fail to ACTUALLY provide any tools to help. Ugh.

 

[tranceme]

Still blows my mind all these years later that there still isn’t a delete all button to delete all photos stored in messages. So annoying having to tap them all one by one in a endless list of photos like you can’t even swipe down to at least select them all rather quickly

That would reduce usage of iCloud as well, right? And, Apple charges for iCloud. Why help reduce usage? Just thinking out loud. But, I agree. Locally, it's crazy this is not there.

 

[terpsbball2002]

double post.

 

[terpsbball2002]

I gave up on trying to make space on my 256 GB iPhone 7. It won't connect to Image Capture on any Mac I have tried. It's literally full (256 of 256 GB used) which is why I think it has so many freaky bugs and is unusably slow. I have deleted everything I can but the videos/photos, which I refuse to delete. But it's become a paper weight now. I ended up buying a really cheap Android phone with a micro-sd card slot that makes it really easy to store all my photos/videos and get them out (plus I started using Google Photos, which unfortunately lose its unlimited backup status soon).

I've tried so much troubleshooting with different Lightning cables, different versions of Mac OS, etc. At one point when this first started, I had found a temporary solution. And there are times it would work. Sometimes some photos would show up and I would import those really quickly and then delete them from the phone, but it was so few that it still is at 256 of 256 GB used.

It's the same problem with Preview and Photos on the Mac which use the same importing software as Image Capture.

I've tried AirDropping, but as I said everything on this phone is so slow and buggy now it doesn't work. Just opening the phone app it will crash multiple times before opening.

I have a similar issue with my 10.5 iPad Pro, my storage randomly fills up. My iPhone 11 same storage at 64 GB (same files), doesn’t fill up.

 

[harmoniumfarfisa]

It's the 3GB of Other caches that's killing me.

I've also got a Filmic Pro file that's 2GB and no way to get it because I offloaded the app, and the Apple store has no record of the download.