How Do You Free Up Memory On Your Phone



Anyone with a smartphone will be veryfamiliar with seeing the dreaded “storage almost full” message flash up on the screen.For those who have ignored these warning signs long enough, it may even read“storage full”. Running out of memory can be quite annoying and disruptive,particularly if it happens just before you need to do something which requiresstorage space.

  1. How Can I Free Up Memory On My Phone
  2. How Do You Free Up Memory On Your Phone Using

For most Apple or Android users, this message will first appear when you are very close to reaching your storage limit, usually about 500MB before. It often shows after you’ve tried to download a new app, that album you’ve been looking forward to or while shooting a video. If the file size is larger than what’s remaining, the prompt will appear and indicate that you need to make room.

The good news is that you don’t have to putup with it. There are simple steps you can take to help stretch your phone’sinternal memory and make use of every megabyte you have.

Sign in to your Google Account. Tap your account profile photo or initial Photos settings Free up device storage. You'll see how much space will be freed up. To delete all the items from your. If your Android phone (or any other Android device) is running low on or flat out of device storage, here are a few ways to free up memory space on your Android device and optimize device memory: Use a microSD card This is the most obvious way to increase storage space on your Android device. Internal memory gets full? Here are some tricks to free up Android internal memory without root.

Transferphotos and videos out of internal storage

We’re all guilty of taking photosand recording videos, and then forgetting to delete them. Over time, thesefiles can accumulate and take up a lot of storage.

By offloading these files to a cloud-basedsystem, it can make a huge difference. If you’re using an iPhone, go toSettings > Apple ID > iCloud > Photos and tap the iCloud Photo Librarytoggle to turn the service on. Once you’ve enabled iCloud Photo Library, yourphotos and videos will automatically upload to iCloud so you’re free to deleteany locally stored files. Apple provides a certain amount of storage for free,with more available for a small fee.

Android users can set up Google Photos toautomatically back up files by launching the app and going to Settings >Back Up & Sync. Google lets you back up unlimited photos and videos forfree, up to 16MP and 1080p HD. You can then access them from any phone, tablet,or computer on photos.google.com.

Beyond iCloud and Google Photos, there arevarious apps you can use to upload your photos and videos to an online account,including Dropbox and Flickr.Alternatively, you could always go through your albums and delete what you donot need.

Getrid of those unwanted apps

Another habit that we all get into isdownloading apps for a specific purpose (or amid a gaming fad – who remembersFlappy Bird?) and then forgetting to delete them. These apps take up asurprisingly large amount of space and if left without updates, can cause yourphone to slow down.

To see how much space each app occupies,iOS users can go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. On an Androidsmartphone, open Settings > Storage > Apps.

By deleting a handful of apps, you couldpotentially free up as much as 500MB with little or no effort.

Removeunnecessary downloads

Unlike a few years ago, our phones nowcontain lots of downloaded content. From podcasts to Netflixepisodes, to music, eBooks and documents. Much like unwanted apps, these areoften downloaded and forgotten about. If you no longer need or use them, deletethem and free up space for new content.

Deleteold text message threads

When you send and receive text messages,your phone automatically stores them for safe keeping. If these texts containimages or videos, they can take up a considerable amount of space.

Fortunately, you do not need to go back andmanually delete all your old text messages. Both Apple and Android phones allowyou to auto-delete old messages.

To enable this feature in iOS, go toSettings > Messages and scroll down until you see Message History. Then, tapKeep Messages and change Forever to 30 Days or 1 Year. Immediately after,you’ll be prompted to delete older messages.

For other devices – like Samsung phones– you simply need to head to Settings and make sure “delete old messages” is toggledon.

By following these tips, you will besurprised at how much storage you can save and in turn, how little you begin tosee those pop-ups again.

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You pull out your phone to snap a spontaneous photo… but then you get an error message because you have no space for the pic. Running out of room on your phone can be a disaster, but it’s totally avoidable.

Free up some space with these tips.

Move your photos and videos to the cloud

Photos and videos can take up a huge chunk of the space on your device, so it’s a good idea to get these files offloaded to the cloud at the earliest opportunity. The good news is that plenty of apps will do the job for you. The not-so-good news is that if you have too many images, you’ll probably have to pay a few dollars a month to store them.

One of the best options is Google Photos. Not only does it work across Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and the web, it also lets you store an unlimited number of photos and videos for free—as long as you don’t mind your images being resized down to a maximum of 16 megapixels and your movies being shrunk to 1080p full HD (so no 4K).

This will not last, though. Google recently announced an update to its Google Photos storage policy, and starting June 1, 2021, any new photos or videos you upload to the platform will count toward the 15GB of free storage in every Google account. That means your photos, the files on your Google Drive, and everything you have in Gmail will use the same limited space.

How Can I Free Up Memory On My Phone

If you want more space or to store your files in full resolution, you’ll have to pay for the service.

Other paid options include Apple’s iCloud (which will not work on an Android phone), Microsoft’s OneDrive, Amazon Photos, and Dropbox. They’ll all save your mobile pictures to the web for a few dollars a month. Check the individual sites for the latest prices, though the tiers are similar across all the competing products, and you’ll typically pay about $10 a month for 1TB of online space.

Whichever option you go for, your app of choice will automatically take care of uploading your photos and videos. You can then delete the local copies—some apps, like Google Photos and iCloud, will even take care of this for you—which will open up extra storage on your phone. For more details, check out our complete guide to cloud-based photo backups.

How Do You Free Up Memory On Your Phone Using

Cut down on apps and games

The next-biggest space hog, after photos and videos, will likely be your apps and games. To avoid completely running out of room, regularly remove apps you’ve not using. You can always re-install them without paying a second time—Apple or Google will keep track of what you’ve already paid for.

But not all apps are equally greedy space-wise. To see which ones are taking up the most room, iOS users can go to Settings, then General, then iPhone Storage. On Android, open Settings, then Storage, then tap Manage Storage.

You can then delete the worst offenders. On iOS, press and hold on an app icon until a dialog box appears, then hit Remove App. On Android, press and hold on an icon in the app drawer, then drag it up to the Uninstall link at the top.

On top of the room that apps themselves take up, many of them also store data, primarily content such as music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows that you might have saved locally for offline use. Whatever apps you use, they should include options for clearing out locally stored files so you can free up some space, though the process will vary from app to app. In Netflix, for example, tap Downloads from navigation bar at the bottom to see all the content you’ve saved.

How Do You Free Up Memory On Your Phone

Other apps—like Facebook, messaging apps, and browsers—will also store data, but not in significant amounts. So it’s not as important to keep tabs on how much space they’re using up. As we mentioned above, the apps list inside your phone’s settings is a good place to check, and you can always completely uninstall bulky apps.

Add extra storage

The previous tips will help you clear out files on your phone. But if you want to keep those files for easy offline access, you’re going to need more storage capacity. Sure, we could tell you to buy a phone that has more than enough storage on board—the iPhone goes up to a whopping 512GB these days—but not everyone has that kind of money. Besides, if you’ve already bought the phone you plan to use for the next few years, you’re not going to run out now and buy a new one just because you’re running out of space.

For Android users, there’s another option. Many phones with this OS come with a microSD card slot, which is a quick and easy way of getting more elbow room for your files and apps. By inserting this card, you can add 400GB of extra space for less than $50. Before you purchase, however, double-check that the card will work with your phone.

How your Android phone “sees” the card will vary depending on which manufacturer made your phone and which version of Android you’re running. Some phones let you run apps on the card, while others will only allow you to store photos and videos on the extra storage. Even if it’s the latter, moving those files will automatically free up room in your phone’s internal memory.

Apple’s iPhones don’t feature expandable internal memory, but you can buy extra peripherals, like the SanDisk iXpand, to boost the available storage. These dongles are effectively automatic backup solutions that pull photos and videos off your device so you can delete the originals. They can be useful, but you’re not actually expanding the available space on your phone like you are with an Android’s extra memory card.

Regularly reset your phone

No space-saving trick works better on your smartphone than running it through a factory reset every now and again. This effectively returns your handset to the state it was in when you first bought it—which means absolutely nothing will remain on there beyond what the manufacturer and Apple or Google have preinstalled.

What puts most people off running through this process is that it wipes your photos, videos, messages, apps, and everything else off your phone—so you’ll need to start from scratch. This means that, before you get started, you need to be absolutely sure that you backed up everything important.

That said, with today’s cloud-first apps and services, resetting a phone isn’t quite the scorched-earth approach it used to be. If all your emails are in Gmail, your songs are in Spotify, your pictures are in Google Photos, and you’ve backed up and downloaded all your messages, the process can be relatively painless. Count this as yet another reason to switch to these cloud-based services for the future.

If you’ve double-checked that you’ve got copies of everything you want to keep, you can find the reset options in your Settings app. It’s under General and Reset on iOS, and System, Advanced, Reset options on Android. Follow the instructions on screen and you’ll soon be back to the beginning as far as your phone and its operating system are concerned. And next time, you’ll know how to be more careful with your phone’s storage space.

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