These two hidden iPhone settings free up storage space so you don’t have to delete precious photos

Are you tired of your iPhone constantly warning you that it is running out of space to store your photos and videos, forcing you to delete prize photos?

Anyone with a lot of multimedia on their phone has probably encountered this problem, possibly when downloading a new app.

Luckily, there are two solutions that are already available on your phone.

One of them is temporary, but the other is permanent.

1. Optimize your iPhone photo and video storage

This is a permanent strategy you can use to preserve all your family photos, text message screenshots, and other precious memories.

Instead of deleting them, you can ‘optimize’ them.

Every time you take a photo or video, your iPhone saves it as a high-resolution file. These files in turn can be quite large.

A typical photo on an iPhone is 1-2 megabytes. If you take 10 a day, it will only take a few months to use up an entire gigabyte.

Tap to optimize your photos Settings > (your name) > iCloud > Photos.

Then tap Sync this iPhone. In iOS 15 or earlier, tap to turn on iCloud Photos.

The first step to optimizing your storage is to enable iCloud storage for photos. This allows your phone to save photos to the cloud.

Then check the ‘Optimize iPhone Storage’ option. This stores high-resolution versions of your photos in iCloud and smaller versions on your phone, freeing up storage space.

Now you’re ready to optimize your storage: Select Optimize iPhone storage to save space on your device.

Once this setting is enabled, the higher resolution versions of your photos and videos will be stored in iCloud. If you haven’t done this before, it may take some time for all your photos to be backed up to the cloud.

Lower resolution versions are saved directly to your device. When you want to access the larger files, you can download them to your phone.

Assuming you have enough iCloud storage space, you can use this option to automatically save as many photos and videos as you want.

If you run out of iCloud storage, you can easily buy more: tap Settings > (your name) > iCloud > Manage account storage > Buy more storage or change storage plan.

For many people, photos make up the majority of storage space. Buying extra storage space is an easy way to avoid having to delete photos.

Apple currently charges $9.99 per month for 2 terabytes of storage (2,000 gigabytes). This is enough for the average person who does not professionally shoot photos and videos.

When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5 gigabytes of storage space.

Technically it’s a large amount, but apps and media can use it up quickly.

This is considered a permanent solution to your storage problem because even though it may cost money, you will theoretically never run out of iCloud space.

2. Offload your largest unused apps to temporarily free up iPhone space

Most of us have tons of apps on our phones, but we only use a few each day.

That means the majority of apps on your iPhone remain unused and take up valuable space. If you need extra storage space for a large download, offloading these inactive apps can give you the space you need.

These include airline apps, your mobile carrier’s billing app, and mobile games like Among Us — apps that most people won’t use often.

Usually this is not a problem. The apps are on your phone and don’t hurt anyone.

But for example, when it’s time to download an iOS update, your phone may be low on space.

Major updates like iOS 16 take up about five gigabytes, while a minor update like iOS 16.1 can still take up about one gigabyte – not a small amount.

When you offload an app, you keep your data for an app but delete the actual program from your phone. It is a middle ground between keeping and deleting.

To see how much storage space your apps are using: Tap Settings > General > iPhone Storage.

In the iPhone Storage menu, you can see which of your apps are using the most storage space. Unsurprisingly, the ones you use most probably take up the most storage space.

Offloading an app keeps your documents and data associated with it, but temporarily removes the app from your phone. Offloading an app is not permanent. You can re-download the app whenever you want.

A menu will open showing which of your apps is the biggest space pig.

Unfortunately, your most used apps will likely also be the apps that take up the majority of your storage space.

But if you scroll down to your lesser-used apps, you’ll find a gigabyte here and a few hundred megabytes there, until you’ve deleted enough apps to afford the new download.

If you offload an app, all your data will still be stored on your phone. If you want to use the app again, you can just go to the same menu and download it again.

You won’t even be logged out.

If you want to save even more space and lose all the documents and data that would allow you to seamlessly re-download an app, you can simply delete it.

Offloading is a temporary solution, but can free up a lot of storage space.

Combined with optimizing your photo storage, this should be enough to keep you from having to spend over $1,000 on a brand new device.