Free up storage on iphone?

March 7, 2017 5:35 AM

I have an iPhone 6S with 16 gigs of storage and an iCloud account with 200 gigs of storage. I have a bunch of pictures stored on the cloud, over 60 gigs. My phone constantly has the 'storage almost full' alert. This happens no matter what I delete. How do I fix this?

My guess is that whenever I delete an app the phone just fills the space with full downloads of pictures from the cloud. What's the solution? Is there any way to tell my iphone to just have all low-resolution images or thumbnails on the iphone? I honestly don't need every single thumnail or low res photo that I ever took on my iphone. Can I partition my photo library so only recent images are stored on my phone and the rest are on the cloud/my macbook? Help!

posted by MisantropicPainforest to Technology (11 answers total)

This trick cleared 3gb for me.
posted by backwards guitar at 6:29 AM on March 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'd go to Settings / iCloud / Storage / Manage Storage and see what's taking up space besides the photos. Maybe backups? How to remove iOS backups from iCloud.
posted by exogenous at 6:53 AM on March 7, 2017

Response by poster: The issue isn't storage on the cloud, it's storage on the phone. And it's already on optimize photo storage, which is how I have a 60 gig library and a phone with 161 gigs of storage total. The optimization simply isn't working right: every time I delete an app the photo library fills the space.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:04 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I need a solution to this problem as well. One thing that worked a bit was deleting and reinstalling Facebook -- that app gets bigger over time as it pulls more data onto the phone, and when reinstalled dropped a few hundred MB. Possibly you have other large apps that could be reinstalled to similar effect.
posted by cubby at 7:52 AM on March 7, 2017

I just cleared out a cache of photos, gifs and other things that had come through as part of text messages that made a world of difference with my storage.
posted by goggie at 8:08 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Definitely delete old message threads. If you text pictures/videos back and forth, those build up fast.
posted by bobobox at 8:29 AM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage to see what apps are taking up the most space.
posted by bobobox at 8:32 AM on March 7, 2017

This Apple discussion page gives a suggestion for people with 16 GB phones: "[They are] not going to be able to use iCloud Photo Library with it. They will have to use iCloud Photo Streaming to get photos to iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Photo Sharing or iTunes syncing to get a subset of photos back to the device."
posted by soelo at 9:54 AM on March 7, 2017

Maybe check to see if the Recently Deleted folder in Photos is empty? Those still count against your total storage...
posted by jenny76 at 10:00 AM on March 7, 2017

I'm in the exact same boat! Checked everything mentioned in this thread and the only relevant thing that actually worked was the crazy movie rental technique linked by backwards guitar (thanks!). Three attempts to rent a movie in iTunes magically got me to 1.06 GB available space.
posted by kittydelsol at 11:41 AM on March 7, 2017

The Facebook app is a huge hog. I had good results just totally deleting the app (and Messenger) and going through the web with a bookmark to it instead. Same experience, much less wasted storage, and bonus, you don't need two apps to read your messages.
posted by Miko at 8:43 PM on March 7, 2017