iPhone Storage Full All The Time?

Updated 10/20/2015

If you are a Vine user and your storage is full on your iPhone you might want to check out “Storage Almost Full and Vine for iPhone“, but read this post too because it can relate to your issues.

Let me guess. You want to take some pictures or videos but your iPhone is constantly full, more like chockablock. You have to delete other pictures first and you probably don’t know how to take the pictures off your phone in the first place. Even better, you have deleted pictures, videos, apps and everything under the sun and your iPhone still says it’s full or almost full. Your like “What the Heck?”

Well I can definitely help you with that since that seems to be one of the biggest questions I get with iPhone users (especially girls and little old ladies).

If you have a ton of videos and pictures you might want to think about getting an external hard drive to store them, you are going to fill up your computer really fast and you can use the extra storage anyways.

Before I tell you what most likely is your issue when it comes to why your iPhone might be full or almost full, let’s cover all the basis first and make sure you have checked everything else first.

First you are going to want to go to Settings > General > Usage

 

Pretty simple here. To the left are your largest apps that take the most space. The right tells you how much space they are taking. If you see some apps that you do not use in this list and they are pretty close to the top, just go ahead and delete them.

Now keep a mental note what the part at the top left that says. Mine says 3.2 GB Available. Your will say something else. You will need to remember this to see if what you are deleting is actually clearing space.

Photos

To be honest photos do not really take that much space up…unless you have like 1,000 or close to that on your iPhone. Then yes clearing that will help and you can do that but exporting them to iTunes. But I would not be to worried about that.

Videos

Now videos do take up way more space than photos so you are going to want to definitely export those into iTunes as well.

Apps

According to that list I showed you, you are going to see if your apps are taking up space. The closer they are to the top the larger amount of space they are taking so you will want to start from the top down. Don’ worry if an app is taking up a ton of space and you do not want to remove it, you may not have too.

Voicemails

Are you the type of person who likes to save their voicemails? Well I am in the same boat but over time they can take up space in your storage. Voicemails can take up to 10% of your storage especially if you have never deleted any of them, but be aware deleting them does not simply remove them from your iPhone.

When you delete a voicemail from your iPhone, it does not actually delete it and add storage. It basically archives it. You have to remove the archive as well to ensure that you remove all the storage they are taking.

How to delete them?

If you click on the voicemail tab at the bottom of your phone you can slide each message and hit delete, but that will put it in a archive if you want to retrieve them later. After you delete your messages you have to click on “Deleted Messages” and then “Clear All”. That will remove them all from your iPhone.

Text Messages

OK here is by far the biggest culprit to taking up space and no one even thinks about it. Your text messages are most likely what is causing your problems.

You see every time you send a picture or video in a text message it is creating a copy of that picture/video and adding it to your text message and just doubling your storage instantly. Shame on Apple not making a better usage of referencing files instead of just duplicating them.

Think of someone you send a ton of pictures and videos too and if you are willing delete that entire text message history. Remove it all. Then go back to General > Settings > Usage and see what it says after you remove that entire text message string. You are going to see that number drop like a ton of bricks.

Hope that helps!