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5 Tips to Maximize Your Phone Storage
It’s inevitable: you *will* eventually run out of memory if you aren’t careful
Isn’t it a marvel how you can fit a portion of your life into a single gadget? Contacts, emails, personal and work-related apps, social media, photos, movies, playlists—modern-day mobile phones can have them all. But of course, being able to have them all and do it all comes with potential setbacks.
These phones are not without limitations. And the first concern when it comes to this subject matter would most probably be memory. Any phone is bound to run out of precious storage if, for example, one keeps feeding it with tons of mobile data.
What exactly should you remember so this doesn’t happen? Give your phone—and its storage—the love it badly needs with these tips:
Delete unused apps
This is a basic tip, but one that works wonders. Maybe you used an app once then lost interest. Maybe you abandoned an app once your free trial has expired. Whatever the case, idle apps take up space. And one obvious way you can make room is to delete them.
Make it a habit to do an inventory of your programs and part ways with those you don’t use. If you happen to delete an app you paid for, you can always revisit the store of purchase and then redownload it.
Back up your camera photos
There’s no doubt that photos are huge space eaters—especially if you’re the type to snap away to secure safety shots. To free up valuable phone storage and secure for yourself a plan B should something happen to your phone, save copies of your photos elsewhere.
On this note, you can take advantage of your phone’s online storage. If you register with iCloud, for example, you will automatically get 5GB of free storage. If you’re willing to shell out cash, you could expand your iCloud storage to as much as 2TB. If you’re an Android user, upload your photos to Google Drive and enjoy unlimited photo backup for free.
Spring for an SD Card
This is not an option for iPhone users, as Apple does not offer expandable memory for its devices via an SD card. But Android phones running on the Marshmallow OS, at the least, can get additional external storage through a microSD card. You can store as much as 256GB worth of pictures and media files on this external storage device.
Some Android phones will also allow you to move apps from your phone’s internal memory onto your SD card. To check if this option is available, go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications on your phone. Tap the app you want to move to microSD (note: the “Move to SD” card option should not be in gray.)
Rent films on iTunes
This may be the trick of all tricks for iPhone users. It’s a hack that can give you additional space on your phone, and the best part is you don’t have to delete apps, music files or photos.
What’s more, is that you don’t have to pay to rent the film! Don’t believe it? You can try it once your phone reaches less than a gigabyte of available space. Here’s how it works:
Go to iTunes and choose a film that takes up more than the free space on your device.
Click the “Rent” button next to the movie title. Recognizing the limited space you have, iTunes will ask you to manage your phone’s storage.
Hit Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage. You should now see that there’s been an increase in your available storage, thanks to your iPhone discreetly removing your apps’ unnecessary data, cookies, and in-app histories.
Delete old messages
It’s okay to be sentimental. But maybe it’s also okay to rethink sentimentality over things like text messages.
This is especially true for pictures or video attachments on apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Telegram that you might not realize are eating up your phone storage. Keep the pictures, sure, but save them elsewhere so that you can delete the rest of your old threads.
With these tricks, you should be able to save extra space on your smartphone. Now you can continue to browse online using your mobile data without having to worry about memory.
