5 Easy Ways to Clear Storage Space on Your iPhone Without Deleting Priceless Photos

If you’re constantly getting pestered by that annoying “Storage Almost Full” pop-up notification — which, of course, always happens at the most inconvenient times like trying to snap a quick picture — there are easy ways you can clear up space on your smartphone, without deleting anything from your camera roll.

Rent a large movie

This is a surprising yet neat trick, first revealed by a Reddit user back in April. It’s also extremely easy to do.

1. Open the iTunes Store on your iPhone
2. Go to Search, and seek out a movie with a large file size — an HD movie with a long runtime works perfectly, but beyond that, it really doesn’t matter which movie you pick.
3. Tap on the movie in question, and select the Rent option.
4. This should prompt a notification informing you that there isn’t enough storage for the movie. That’s a good thing.
5. Tap on OK.
6. Head to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud usage.
7. Revel in the extra space that seemed to appear like magic.

Delete cumbersome or unused apps

As much as we love our iOS apps, there’s no denying that some of them can eat up lots of space very quickly. One of the easier ways of freeing up storage space on your iPhone is delete some of the apps that are too storage-heavy, or ones that you hardly use.

1. Open Settings
2. Scroll down and tap on Manage Storage.
3. From here, you’ll see a list of apps — and the storage they currently take up on your phone.
4. From here, you’ll have the options of deleting the most serious offenders, or just decluttering your iPhone by getting rid of apps you don’t use.

Clean up some of your Photos settings

There are a couple of storage offenders hidden in the Photos app — and they’re not the photos themselves.

One of them is My Photo Stream, which automatically syncs recent photos to your Cloud — and creates a new album on your phone called My Photo Stream that can take up space. If you don’t need your iPhone to sync photos across your iCloud automatically, turn this feature off by going to Settings > iCloud > Photos and turn off the My Photo Stream setting. Even when it’s off, you can always sync photos manually by plugging your phone into your Mac.

The other pesky storage thief is associated with the Camera app’s HDR setting. HDR balances the shadows and highlights of a picture to leave you with a better quality result. It also saves an extra, “normal” version of your photo to your phone by default. To turn that off, just go to Settings > Photos & Camera, and toggle Keep Normal Photo to off.

Delete your old text messages

Most of us probably send and receive a lot of text messages — and those messages can quickly eat up storage on your phone. Sure, there are always some texts that are sentimental or significant enough to keep, but, for the most part, we can probably stand to do without a lot of our texts.

You can delete text messages a couple of different ways.

1. Open Messages.
2. Find a text thread you can do without.
3. Swipe to the right, and hit Delete.
4. To delete older messages automatically – open Settings.
5. Scroll down and tap on Messages.
6. Scroll down and find the Keep Messages option, and tap on it.
7. From here, you’ll get the option of setting your phone to delete messages after 30 days, one year, or never. Select the option you want.
8. At this point, your phone will automatically delete messages older than the setting you chose.

Clear your browser app’s cache

Many of the computer-savvy among us already know this trick — but it also applies to our smartphones as well. While clearing the cache will make websites you visit often to load a bit slower — the space you save might just offset the wait.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to Safari.
3. Select Clear History and Website Data.

If you use Google Chrome on your iOS device, follow these steps instead.

1. Open the Chrome app.
2. Tap on the 3-dot menu in the right-hand corner of the app.
3. Tap on the Settings option.
4. Tap on Privacy.
5. Tap on Clear Browsing Data.