Top Tips for Freeing up Space On iPhone and iPad

In today’s post we want to share with you some of the top tips for freeing up space on your iPhone or iPad. This is going to be particularly useful is you own one of the 16GB iOS devices. Space is something that every iPhone and iPad user is always looking for and if you find that your device is running low, take a look at our top tips and see how much space you can retrieve.

Clear Safari History and Website Data

First up we target Safari. If you haven’t cleared Safari data in a while you may be surprised to find that you can retrieve up to 1GB or more of storage space on your device. To clear it all you have to do is go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website data > Clear History and Data. That’s it, free space.

Turn OFF My Photo Stream

Photo Stream automatically saves your last 1,000 photos from your Camera Roll and then pushes them to other iCloud enabled devices. In some cases, Photo Stream can also take up some space on your device too. You can turn it off if you need to save valuable storage space. Do this by going to Settings > iCloud > Photos > My Photo Stream

Turn on iCloud Photo Library

The new iCloud Photo Library saves everything in your Camera Roll to iCloud so you can choose whether or not to keep the original version of your photos on your device or not. Turn on iCloud Photo Library and move all your photos to the cloud by going to Settings > iCloud > Photos > iCloud Photo Library. It is important to be aware of the fact that each account only gets around 5GB of free space on iCloud and after that you will have to upgrade your iCloud storage plan.

Delete and Reinstall Apps

There are lots of apps that cache files to help them load content faster. This may sound like a good thing but the negative effect is that the cache files often use up space on your device. The likes of Spotify and Facebook can use a lot of data so it is no harm to delete and reinstall these every once in a while. Also just so you know, if you do delete and reinstall any of these apps, you don’t lose any of your information. If you have Spotify and you delete the app, when you reinstall it all your playlists and preferences will still be there. Deleting the apps only clears all the temporary cache files so you get your storage space back.

Delete Music and Stream Via Cloud

Apple allows you to stream all the music you have bought on iTunes from iCloud without having to download them to your device. To do this, you will first need to delete all the music stored locally. Once done, you will see all your music titles from iTunes showing up in your Music app ready to stream via iCloud. Alternatively, you can also switch to one of the many music services such as Spotify, Beats Music or Sound Cloud and more.

Delete Large iMessage Threads

If you share lots of photos and videos via iMessage it can take up lots of storage space. Deleting large threads and those with lots of photos and videos will help free up space.

Update to the Latest Version of iOS

If you are not concerned about jailbreaking and you are running an earlier version of iOS, then it really is time to update. Earlier versions of iOS 8.x are known to take away lots of storage space and Apple has since fixed this problem in their latest firmware releases. You can update to the latest iOS firmware via OTA by going to Settings > General > Software Update.

By going through your devices on a regular basis and doing some general tidying you should be able to free up a lot of storage space. Delete apps that you no longer use. It doesn’t matter because if you want to use them again they will be listed in your purchased apps on the App store. We hope you found these tips useful and if you have any that you would like to share please do so in the comments below.