You’re trying to download an app, snap a photo, or update iOS — and your iPhone hits you with that dreaded “Storage Almost Full” warning. Your first instinct might be to start deleting photos, apps, and messages like a digital minimalist on a rampage. But hold on. You don’t need to nuke everything to get your storage back under control.
There are tons of sneaky storage hogs hiding on your iPhone that you probably don’t even know about. Cached data, old message attachments, duplicate photos, forgotten downloads — all quietly eating up gigabytes. The good news? You can reclaim a surprising amount of space without losing anything you actually care about.
Here’s exactly how to do it.
Check What’s Actually Using Your Storage
Before you start clearing things out, you need to know where the problem is. No point deleting apps if it turns out your Messages app is hoarding 12 GB of memes your friend sent you three years ago.
How to View Your Storage Breakdown
- Open Settings
- Tap General
- Tap iPhone Storage
Give it a moment to load — it calculates everything on the fly. Once it’s done, you’ll see a color-coded bar at the top showing what’s taking up space, followed by a list of every app sorted by size. This screen is your best friend right now. It tells you exactly which apps are the biggest offenders and even gives you personalized recommendations at the top.
Pay attention to the difference between App Size and Documents & Data when you tap into individual apps. The app itself might only be 100 MB, but its cached data could be several gigabytes. That’s where the real savings are.
Clear Safari’s Cache and Website Data
Safari quietly stores cached images, cookies, browsing history, and website data every time you visit a page. Over months of browsing, this adds up to a surprising amount.
Steps to Clear Safari Data
- Go to Settings → Apps → Safari
- Scroll down and tap Clear History and Website Data
- Confirm by tapping Clear History
Fair warning: this logs you out of websites you were signed into through Safari. You’ll need to log back in to things like social media or banking sites. But it’s a quick win that can free up anywhere from a few hundred megabytes to over a gigabyte, depending on how much you browse.
If you don’t want to wipe everything, you can selectively remove data for specific websites. Go to Settings → Apps → Safari → Advanced → Website Data, and you can swipe to delete data from individual sites.
Offload Unused Apps
This is one of the best features Apple has added for storage management, and a lot of people don’t even know it exists. Offloading an app removes the app itself but keeps all its data and documents. When you reinstall the app later, everything picks up right where you left off.
Offload Apps Individually
- Go to Settings → General → iPhone Storage
- Scroll through the list and tap any app you haven’t opened in a while
- Tap Offload App
The app icon stays on your home screen with a small cloud symbol. Tap it anytime to re-download. Your save data, login info, and preferences stay intact.
Enable Automatic Offloading
If you want your iPhone to handle this automatically:
- Go to Settings → App Store
- Toggle on Offload Unused Apps
Your iPhone will automatically offload apps you haven’t used in a while when storage gets tight. It’s basically free storage with zero effort on your part.
Clean Up Message Attachments
The Messages app is a silent storage killer. Every photo, video, GIF, sticker, and voice message anyone has ever sent you is sitting in there, taking up space. People are routinely shocked to find Messages using 5, 10, even 20+ GB.
Delete Large Attachments
- Go to Settings → General → iPhone Storage
- Tap Messages
- Under Documents & Data, you’ll see categories like Top Conversations, Photos, and Videos
- Tap into each category and delete the big stuff you don’t need
Videos are usually the biggest offenders here. A handful of videos people sent you in group chats can easily eat up several gigabytes.
Set Messages to Auto-Delete
You can also prevent this from building up again:
- Go to Settings → Apps → Messages
- Under Message History, tap Keep Messages
- Change it from Forever to 1 Year or 30 Days
This automatically removes old conversations. If there’s a specific thread you want to keep, save the important stuff (screenshots, notes) before enabling this.
Review and Delete Large Videos and Photos
You don’t need to delete your entire photo library. The trick is targeting the stuff that takes up the most space — and that’s almost always video.
Find and Remove Large Videos
- Open the Photos app
- Go to Albums → Media Types → Videos
- Sort through and delete any you don’t need — screen recordings, accidental clips, duplicates
A single 4K video recorded at 60fps can use over 400 MB per minute. If you’ve got a bunch of old screen recordings or random clips, clearing those out makes a huge difference.
Remove Duplicate Photos
Starting with iOS 16, Apple added a built-in duplicate detection feature:
- Open Photos
- Go to Albums and scroll down to Utilities
- Tap Duplicates
- Review and tap Merge to combine duplicates (it keeps the highest quality version)
If you take burst shots or screenshot the same thing multiple times, you’d be surprised how many duplicates pile up. This feature alone can recover hundreds of megabytes.
Use iCloud Photos to Your Advantage
If you’re paying for iCloud storage (or have the free 5 GB tier with room), enable Optimize iPhone Storage:
- Go to Settings → [Your Name] → iCloud → Photos
- Make sure iCloud Photos is turned on
- Select Optimize iPhone Storage
This keeps full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud while storing smaller, compressed versions on your device. When you open a photo, it downloads the full version on the fly. You won’t notice any difference in daily use, but you could save several gigabytes instantly.
Clear App Caches Without Deleting the App
Some apps — especially social media, streaming, and news apps — cache enormous amounts of data. Spotify stores offline playlists, Instagram caches every reel you’ve scrolled past, and podcast apps keep downloaded episodes you’ve already listened to.
Check Individual App Storage
- Go to Settings → General → iPhone Storage
- Tap on any app to see its breakdown
- Look at the Documents & Data number — if it’s way bigger than the app size, there’s cached data to clean
Unfortunately, iOS doesn’t have a universal “clear cache” button for most apps. Here’s what you can do for specific ones:
- Spotify: Go to Settings within the app → Storage → Delete Cache
- Instagram: No built-in cache clear — you’ll need to delete and reinstall the app (you won’t lose anything since it’s all server-side)
- YouTube: Settings → General → Clear Watch History, or delete and reinstall
- Podcasts: Delete downloaded episodes you’ve already listened to
- Netflix/Disney+: Remove downloaded shows and movies you’ve already watched
For apps that don’t offer a cache-clearing option, the delete-and-reinstall method works. Just make sure your data syncs to the cloud (most social media and streaming apps do) before removing them.
Manage Your Downloads and Files
The Files app can accumulate downloads you forgot about — PDFs, documents, zip files, random stuff from the web.
Clean Up the Files App
- Open the Files app
- Tap Browse at the bottom
- Go to On My iPhone
- Check each folder for files you no longer need
- Also check the Downloads folder — it’s usually the biggest culprit
While you’re at it, check Recently Deleted in the Files app. Deleted files sit there for 30 days before they’re actually removed, still taking up space.
Empty the Recently Deleted Folder in Photos
This one catches people off guard. When you delete photos and videos, they don’t actually disappear right away. They go to a Recently Deleted album and hang around for up to 30 days.
- Open Photos
- Go to Albums and scroll to Utilities
- Tap Recently Deleted
- Tap Select, then Delete All
If you just went through and deleted a bunch of videos and photos, this step is essential. Otherwise, you haven’t actually freed up any space yet — it’s all sitting in the digital recycling bin.
Reduce Mail Storage
If you’ve been using the Mail app for years, old emails with attachments stack up quietly.
Quick Mail Cleanup
- Delete emails with large attachments you no longer need
- Empty the Trash and Junk folders in each email account
- If Mail is using a massive amount of storage, consider removing and re-adding the email account: Settings → Mail → Accounts → select the account → Delete Account, then add it back
Re-adding the account forces a fresh sync and clears locally cached email data. Your emails aren’t deleted — they’re all still on the server.
Update iOS (Yes, Really)
This sounds counterintuitive since updates need free space to install. But newer iOS versions often include storage optimizations and better cache management. Apple occasionally reclaims space through system-level cleanup during updates.
If you’re running an older iOS version and struggling with storage, updating might actually help. Go to Settings → General → Software Update to check.
If you don’t have enough space to update over the air, connect to a Mac or PC and update through Finder (Mac) or iTunes (Windows). The computer handles the heavy lifting so your iPhone doesn’t need as much free space.
Turn Off Photo Stream and Shared Albums You Don’t Use
If you have My Photo Stream enabled, your iPhone stores recent photos locally for syncing — even if you already use iCloud Photos. That’s redundant storage usage.
- Go to Settings → [Your Name] → iCloud → Photos
- If iCloud Photos is already on, you can safely turn off My Photo Stream
Also check your Shared Albums. If you’re part of shared albums with hundreds of photos you never look at, leaving them won’t save space since they don’t count against your storage — but it’s worth knowing the difference so you focus your cleanup effort where it actually matters.
Bonus: Quick Wins That Add Up
Here are a few more small things that collectively make a difference:
- Delete old voicemails: Phone app → Voicemail → swipe to delete old ones, then tap Deleted Messages to permanently remove them
- Remove unused keyboards and languages: Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards — delete any you’re not using
- Clear Siri suggestions data: Settings → Siri → Siri & Search History → Delete Siri & Search History
- Disable HDR originals: Go to Settings → Camera and check if your phone is keeping both the normal and HDR version of photos. Keep only the better one.
- Review your voice memos: Open the Voice Memos app and delete any old recordings
A Simple Maintenance Routine
Once you’ve done a big cleanup, keep things manageable going forward. You don’t need to do this every week — once a month is plenty:
- Check Settings → General → iPhone Storage for anything unexpected
- Empty the Recently Deleted folders in Photos and Files
- Clear Safari history and website data
- Delete message threads with large attachments you’ve already saved
- Remove downloaded content from streaming apps you’ve finished watching
Five minutes once a month keeps that “Storage Almost Full” warning from ever popping up again.
Wrapping Up
You really don’t need to go scorched earth on your iPhone to get storage back. Most of the space hogs are invisible — cached data, old attachments, forgotten downloads, and that Recently Deleted album nobody remembers to empty. Target those first, enable features like Offload Unused Apps and Optimize iPhone Storage, and you’ll be amazed how much space you can recover without losing a single photo or app you care about.
Start with the iPhone Storage screen in Settings. It’ll point you right at the biggest problems. Tackle those first, work your way down, and your iPhone will feel brand new — without a factory reset in sight.