Is there anything more annoying than a little notification popping up on your screen telling you that your storage on your phone is almost full? Or when you try to take a picture and your phone refuses, citing storage being full as it's issue? Or how about when you think you've downloaded loads of podcasts for your morning commute only to find when you reach the (wifi-less) station that they've failed due to, yep you guessed it, not enough storage space.
Unless you went large and splashed out on the 64GB phone (fancy pants), you're probably suffering at the mercy of a miniscule 16GB to hold literally everything you hold near and dear to you from your photos and videos to your Podcasts, music and TV shows, Candy Crush and your virtual puppy app that you tell no-one about. And it's just not enough is it?
Luckily, there's a few things you can do to free up space on your phone. Not like, enough room for all 300-odd epsiodes of Don't Tell The Bride, but enough that next time you want to take in impromptu picture of your friends they don't have to hold their pose for an awkward minute-and-a-half while you figure out which selfie to delete to make room.
Here's what to do
1. Check your Whatsapp
Whatsapp automatically stores all media that's been sent to you so, if you've got a well-meaning friend who likes to send you daily videos of her singing Ginuwine's Pony then chances are large parts of your phone's memory are going towards harbouring those. To stop this madness, A) tell your friend to get a job and B) go to the 'settings' section of the app, then 'chats', and turn off 'Save Incoming Media'.
2. Check your Messages
Again, all those pictures of Justin Bieber you and your friend exchange by iMessage/text message every day? Destroying your storage. Go into your conversations with your most messages people and delete all the pictures, gifs and videos in it. To do this, open the convo on the messaging app, click 'details' and all the pictures within the conversation will show up. Press and hold one of them, click 'more' and the option to select lots at one time will shop up. Delete them all. Phew.
3. Don't get tricked by the Podcast app
Ever since it got it's fancy new update, the Podcast app has (IMHO) been a lot more difficult to use. It's much harder to see which podcasts you've got available and, if you start listening to one it disappears from the 'unplayed' section meaning you have to go into the individual podcast sections to see which are downloaded and which aren't. Check each podcast to see if there's errant half-listened to epsiodes still floating around and, if so, delete them.
4. Get the Cleaner Up app
Whether you took 17 pictures of the same cocktail or your albums (confusing at the best of time) have buggered up and cross-polinated, you've probably got a lot of photos that are A) very similar to each other or B) exactly the same as each other thanks to a duplication sitatuation. Cleaner Up the app goes through all of your pictures and brings up all of the ones that are the same/similar and lets you choose which ones you want to ditch and which ones you want to keep. A good way to clear out a huge chunk in one go.
5. Go through your Spotify
If you've got songs saved to play in 'Offline' mode, they're taking up loads of space. Do you really need your whole library to be available to you at all times? How's about keep a choice playlist with Bieber, Drake and Adele on it and ditch the rest. You can still listen to them when you're connected to wifi obvs.
6. Check out 'Documents and Data'
If you plug your phone into your computer, you'll notice on iTunes that there's a little section in that bar showing where all your memory's going called 'Documents and Data'. Boring. To find out what's been dumped there, go to 'Settings', 'iCloud', 'Storage', 'Manage Storage adn swipe right to delete any of the rubbish on there that you don't need any more.
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Follow Jess on Twitter @Jess_Commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.