Capturing important moments with your camera is easier than ever. iPhonefrom meeting with family during the holidays to celebrating the New Year with friends and loved ones. Although your phone initially had a lot of space, over time it fills up with photos, apps, and videos that take up all that space.
But before you panic delete your vacation photos or shell out for a more expensive model, take a breath. You don't have to lose a single memory to make room.
With several built-in iOS features and lesser-known tricks, you can declutter hidden clutter and free up storage space without deleting what you really care about. It's fast, easy and, best of all, all the tools you need are already right in your settings.
Read more: Change These 8 iOS 18 Settings Before You Do Anything Else
There are two built-in iOS settings that will help you clear up a significant amount of storage on your iPhone—one permanent and the other temporary. More free space will allow you install the latest software updatestake more photos and videos and download more apps. Here's what you need to know.
If you want more tips on increasing iPhone storage, visit secret iOS settings every iPhone user should know And best cloud storage options in 2025.
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Optimize photos and videos on iPhone to get more storage space
If you want to preserve your precious memories (even just screenshots of memes) but still free up space, the easiest way is to optimize the photos and videos already stored on your device.
By default, every time you take a photo or video, it is saved to your device at full resolution. If you shoot photos and videos at the highest resolution possible, they can take up quite a lot of space. A minute of video shot in 4K at 60 frames per second takes up approximately 400 MB – almost half a gigabyte. This is quite important.
To optimize your photos and videos, go to Settings > Photos and turn on Optimize iPhone Storage (for this to work you will need iCloud Photos the setting above is enabled). Depending on how many photos and videos you have on your iPhone, this may take quite a while, but once it's completed, you'll see significantly more storage space on your device.
For this to work, you need to turn on the iCloud Photos setting.
All your full-resolution photos and videos are then transferred to iCloud, and smaller, lower-resolution versions are stored on your device to take up less space. If you want to access your photos and videos in higher resolution, you can go to the Photos app and upload any file you're optimizing; This requires a decent internet connection. Your recently captured photos and videos can exist in full resolution, so you don't have to download every photo or video.
If you don't have enough space in iCloud, it's easier upgrade your cloud than buying a new phone. In the US, you can upgrade to 50GB for just a dollar a month, or upgrade to 200GB for $3 a month or 2TB for $10 a month. Prices vary depending on your country or region.
To update iCloud on iPhone, follow the link Settings > (Your name) > iCloud > Account Storage Management > Buy more storage space. Choose a plan and follow the instructions. If you upgrade to any paid iCloud subscription, you'll get access to iCloud+, which also offers iCloud Private Relay and Hide My Email features.
You can spend as little as $1 a month to increase your iCloud storage.
Offload the largest apps to save space on your iPhone
You're not using all the apps stored on your iPhone. A lot of them are just sitting there, like airline apps, third-party cameras, and music production. Even if you use these apps occasionally, you probably won't need access to most of them on a daily basis, so you should consider offloading apps, especially when you desperately need storage.
Let's say you want to download and install the latest iOS update. If it's a major update, like iOS 16, you may need a little more than 5GB to install the software. If it's a targeted update, like iOS 16.1, you'll need about 1GB. And if you don't have enough space to update, you can quickly unload apps, which is a middle ground between keeping and deleting your apps.
Go to Settings > General > iPhone storage and check which apps are taking up the most space. Some built-in apps, such as Photos and Messages, cannot be unloaded, so be careful. If you find a large app that you want to download, click on it and click Unload the application. Wait a moment and the app will be removed offline, but your documents and data will remain saved on your device.
You need to click “Unload App” twice to “uninstall” the app.
If you need temporary storage to download software, simply go through the list and download all possible applications. The amount uploaded for each application will be different, but you should see a number next to Application size. Discard the number next to Documents and Data because it will remain on your device. The only way to get rid of this is to uninstall the application.
Unload as many apps as you need until you have enough space. You can't use an unloaded app, but if you want to get it back, go to your App Library and click the iCloud button to re-download it. If the downloaded app is on your home screen, simply tap on it to download. You won't have to re-login or anything like that; you will have access to the application as if it was never uninstalled.
