Good management of your iPhone storage is an essential part of attaining your personal and business goals. If your iPhone storage is not accurate, it can prevent you from planning for digital entertainment media, social media use, and even your day-to-day fitness tracking needs. You can check your iPhone’s storage in just a few simple steps, but what can you do when the figure for the number of gigabytes that you have as available storage is incorrect?
You’ll always require some storage space for educational materials, photos of friends, and news releases in video format. If your iPhone is saying that there’s not enough storage for a video or another download, when you know that your device has enough storage space, there are a few simple steps you can follow to fix the issue. In this step-by-step guide, I’ll show you exactly how to fix that issue, so follow me as I walk you through.
Iphone storage not adding up? Check your deleted files
Your iPhone may be showing you an incorrect total for available storage because it’s incorrectly accounting for the deleted files in its memory. Perhaps you’ve already deleted pictures, or other files, because you wanted to make sure you had sufficient space to store new media. Even after doing so, you may still be getting an error message regarding the amount of iPhone storage available.
This sometimes happens when your iPhone doesn’t register the fact that deleted files are no longer in their initial location. For example, pictures and videos on a desktop computer are moved to the Recycle Bin when they are erased. When it comes to iPhone, media files are moved to a Recently Deleted Photos folder.
In the Recently Deleted Photos folder, your photos and videos may still be counted among the files that need to be assigned a share of the device’s memory. After erasing your photos from Message Attachments and other locations, you’ll also need to delete them from the Recently Deleted Photos folder. If you don’t do that, your iPhone may prevent you from saving new files.
You’ll have to do this manually, since apple does not have an automatic option to do that. The Cupertino based brand offers a method for removing recently deleted files, but that method is rather slow. It can take you up to thirty days to remove files that you’ve deleted, if you depend on Apple’s native system.
The problem is that a lot of the time when people decide to delete files, it’s because they’ve received a notification letting them know that no space is available. Acttually, you don’t have to wait thirty days. The fix given in this article will help you to quickly create space for pictures at an event you’re planning to attend.
Keep in mind to do this every time you get rid of files from your iPhone in order to get additional space. It doesn’t matter whether you are removing text documents, photos, video or audio files. All of them can be incorrectly included in storage calculations when they are in a Recently Deleted folder.
Iphone storage not adding up? Restart your iPhone
Once you’ve deleted your photos from the Recently Deleted Photos folder, restart your iPhone. Your device will need to go through this process, so it can be updated fully on the status of all files. After you restart your iPhone, you should get an accurate quantity of storage that is available.
If your iPhone storage capacity was wrong, this should be resolved after you restart your device. Always try to remove unnecessary files as often as you can. This will keep your phone ready for any activity that you plan.
iPhone storage not adding up? What’s taking up your storage space?
Before you can download audio files to listen to while you are out and about, you’ll need to find out what is taking up space on your iPhone. Head over to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. You’ll see a bar chart that shows you how many Gigabytes the apps and functions on your iPhone are using. The bar for each one is allocated a bright color, so you can easily see the amount of space taken by each app.
The storage allocation bars are organized from the highest, to the lowest, so you can easily pinpoint the app that will free up the most space. If you’re Fan of playing games, you may see a lot of Gigabytes assigned to this category. Graphic designers may have loads of image files on their phone, to help them create art on the go. Sometimes you’ll find out that you’re giving space on your device to an app that you rarely use.
Manage Audio Files
You can quickly free up storage space on your iPhone by deleting unused apps. Make sure that you only delete apps that you don’t use. If you have a podcast app, you’re likely to have a bunch of episodes on it that you’ve already downloaded and listened to. The knowledge you got from them may already be a part of your life. Erase them, and create room for the enlightening podcasts you’ll listen to in the days to come.
Check all the apps that you’ve used to download music. Some of them may no longer have to be accessible on your iPhone, because you have them stored somewhere else. Maybe you have a tutorial you’ve listened to, and you’re done with it. If you have another copy of the audio, or have a subscription for lifelong access, you can use external storage on the cloud to save space on your iOS device, so consider using Dropbox, Google drive, or other reliable options.
iPhone storage not accurate? Manage Images and video
If you often check work-related emails, and download images from those to your device, you can get large amount of space by deleting all the previous images. Also search for PDF files and other documents related to work projects that have already been completed. Most of these are usually stored in the Downloads section of your iPhone, and you can select them individually.
Removing unimportant video files on a regular basis helps to prevent problems with processing time, which sometimes happen when your iOS device is slowed down by too many media files. You can easily schedule a regular time for this, and help to keep your iPhone in good working condition. Go through work-related materials, ensuring that you only keep those which are important, and that they’re password protected.
Stop photo streaming
Your iPhone automatically streams your photographs across all of your Apple devices, and it can handle a thousand photos this way. It can come in handy especially when you want to have an automatic backup for your photos. However, this can take up huge amount of space, and there are more great ways of saving extra copies of your photos. You can save them to other services instead, for instance Google Photos free of charge.
You can create space on your iPhone by stopping photo live streaming. Go to Settings > Photos > My Photo Stream and turn the feature off. In case you want to stream recent photos again, you can easily switch it back on.
Reduce files associated with HDR
HDR photos make use of the modern technology, showing elements in each image that would not be captured without this type of technology. This result is made possible by using 3 different exposures.
The final photo is usually a mixture of the best sections of each exposure. Your phone stores all of those exposures, and that takes large amount of memory. To turn off this feature, head over to Settings > Camera and turn off Keep Normal Photo.
Manage your app usage
Apple offers you two ways to adjust your app usage. Doing that will give you more space on your iPhone. The first option involves deleting them completely, and that will provide you with more space instantly. The only drawback with this approach is that deleting an app is permanent, and you’ll no longer have access to any of its features.
If you don’t use an app regularly, you can go ahead and delete it. For instance, if you use a distance tracking app whenever you go hiking, you won’t need to always have it on your device. You can erase it completely, and just download it again whenever you need it.
The next method involves Offloading apps. This approach works well for some iPhone clients. When you offload an app, it frees up space because the software is no longer available to you. Your iOS device will still hold all of the files and data associated with the app.
Offloading apps makes it easy to repopulate fields with your desired data, when you choose to reinstall the app. That can really save your time, and can come in handy for apps you might use every now and then.
To offload an app, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Tap any app that you’re interested in and tap Offload. Once the process is complete, that option will turn into Reinstall. When you’re ready to reinstall it, you won’t have to search for it on the app store. You can just tap it, to start using it again.
Manage Browsing Activity
Your browser stores a huge amount of data. Every time you search for something on the internet, storage space is used to keep the information. That’s what makes it easy for your browser to display your most frequently searched terms the moment you launch it.
If you often search for information on the internet, a lot of space can be used in the process. All of your login data also takes up space, even if you only save one factor used for authentication.
You can clear your browsing history and data under the individual settings menu for each app. Some browsers allows you to delete the data by navigating to Settings On your iPhone, and selecting the app. If you use various web browsers, go through the same process for each one, and free up more storage space. Also consider deleting browsers which you don’t use and remain with the one with the features you appreciate.
Delete your Messages
Messaging is a common means of communication, and an average user sends at least five messages a day. Each of these may have one, or several responses, and your iOS device saves all of those threads locally. If you’ve never deleted a message, you are probably using huge amount of memory on messages related to things that are no longer necessary.
You can set your iOS device to automatically delete your messages after a given time. Some people choose to remove those which are older than a year, while others may delete messages over 30 days old.
iOS offers you an option to keep all of your messages forever, so it’s a good idea to check to ensure that option is not activated. You can do this by going to Settings, tap Messages, and adjust the settings under Message History.
Even after you configure your settings for automatic deletions, you need to manually go through your messages and attend to other issues that take up precious space. Sometimes, you may receive messages with attachments, such as pictures from a picnic, or a video of a friend shooting wildlife.
Attachments brings a smile on your face, but after viewing them the first time, you don’t need to store all of them on your device. You can tap each message, and then tap on the “I” icon. This will display all the videos and pictures connected to it, giving you option to remove the ones that you no longer need.
Deleting attachments manually is time consuming. There’s another option for controlling the amount of space that is used on attachments. Head over to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Tap on Review Large Attachments to remove them from the device.
Closing thoughts
If your iPhone storage is not accurate, the problem may be due to deleted files that your iOS device doesn’t recognize as being removed yet. Once you’ve resolved that, and take steps to delete other files that are taking up memory on your iPhone, you’ll enjoy a better user experience. Your iPhone will be faster, and you can profit from new and interesting media.