With that said, if you’re absolutely certain that you don’t need to recover any deleted photos or videos, you can delete everything in the “Recently Deleted” folder and quickly get back some precious storage space. RELATED: 5 Things You Need to Know About Your iPhone’s Photos App This makes it easier to recover photos if you accidentally deleted them, but it can take up more and more space over time. After 30 days, then they’re permanently deleted.
Instead, there’s a 30-day grace period where these files are moved to a “Recently Deleted” folder in the Photos app (much like the Recycle Bin on your computer). Many iOS users forget that when they delete a photo or video, it actually doesn’t delete it from their device right away.
Permanently Delete “Recently Deleted” Photos All you have to do now is swipe left and hit “Delete” on anything you don’t need anymore. This will show a list of every single photo, video, and other attachment that the Messages app has saved from all of your conversation threads, and it’s in order by largest size first. To do this, find the Messages app in the list on the main storage screen and select it.įrom there, tap on “Review Large Attachments”. Luckily, there’s a feature in iOS 11 that lets you quickly see any large iMessage attachments and delete them. If you end up saving those photos or videos to your iOS device, copies will still take up space in the Messages app. Not only does it store your text message history, but it also keeps photo and video attachments you’ve received. The Messages app is a huge culprit when it comes to storage space.
HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC YOSEMITE UNUSED APPS HOW TO
RELATED: How to Free Up Space Used By Your iPhone or iPad's Messages App Some apps might have their own way of deleting this kind of data in their own settings, so check there first. Unfortunately, the only way to delete that cache is to delete the entire app completely and then reinstall it. What if you want to delete an app’s documents and data rather than the app itself? Many apps build up a cache over time, which can take up a lot of space. From there, tap on “Offload Unused Apps” (you may have to tap on “Show All” if it doesn’t appear). Be careful here, though, as it won’t tell you which apps it offloads. To do this, go back to the main storage screen. You can also have iOS automatically offload apps for you whenever your device starts to run out of storage space. RELATED: How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad by Offloading Unused Apps And if that app is synced with iCloud, that data will come back as well. The remaining 32MB of data will stick around in case you ever want to reinstall the app in the future. So for instance, the Facebook app is a good example here-it takes up 258MB of total space, but 226MB of that will be deleted when you offload it. This will delete the app from your phone, but will keep all of the documents and data associated with the app installed on your device. If you don’t want to completely get rid of everything associated with that app or game, you can instead tap on “Offload App”. Tap on any app or game in the list you no longer use and hit “Delete App” to remove it from your device. Games are particularly large, so those will probably appear near the top of your usage list if you have any installed. Delete or Offload Appsĭeleting apps is probably the quickest and easiest way to free up storage space, especially since you probably have some apps that you don’t use anymore. Now that you know how much storage space you have taken up and which apps are the cause, let’s look into some ways that you can reclaim all that lost storage space once and for all.