Apple is pretty keen on selling you upgraded storage on youriPhone, and it’s no wonder. Typically, the company charges you an additional $100 each time you double internal storage – it costs $899 for a 256GBiPhone 16instead of $799 for 128GB, for example. But since it doesn’t actually cost Apple $100 to buy a better memory chip, Apple makes a very tidy profit off the millions of iPhones it sells every year.
you’re able to’t upgrade an iPhone’s physical capacity on your own, at least not without expensive tools and serious technical know-how. But if your iPhone is rapidly filling up with photos and videos, the good news is that Apple has provided multiple software options for maximizing the storage you do have. You may need to spend some time fiddling withiOSto get the full effect.
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Option 1: Merge duplicate photos and videos
A surprisingly common problem
If you’ve only been using an iPhone for a few years, you might be amazed at how easy it can be to amass unwanted duplicates. Your partner, for instance, might one day message you old photos you forgot you already had. Duplicates can also be spawned by third-party cloud services, and it’s all too easy to churn out identical screenshots with accidental button presses.
In iOS 18 or later, finding and eliminating duplicates is simple. Follow these steps:
Just be sure to exercise some caution. While iOS tends to do a good job at identifying unnecessary copies and preserving the correct metadata (date, location, etc.), you may want to check and scrub duplicates manually if a file is especially important to you.
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Best used with iCloud+
Apple’s official recommendation is that you have your iPhone automatically remove full-resolution copies of photos and videos from local storage, leaving those in iCloud until you need to access them. What’s left are smaller, “device-sized” files, and indeed this can go a long way to making the most out of a 128GB iPhone.
There are some catches, however. For one, you might have trouble fetching full-resolution files when you need them, whether it’s because you’re legitimately out of local storage or you don’t have a reliable internet connection. More importantly, this isn’t going to help if you’re already maxing out your iCloud space. It could become necessary to upgrade toiCloud+, which costs anywhere between $1 and $10 per month depending on how much storage you need. Apple only provides 5GB for free.
To enable the option in iOS 18 or later, use these steps:
Be patient, since it may take a while for the offloading process to complete. You should be able to keep using your iPhone in the meantime.
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Option 3: Change quality settings for the Camera app
Don’t shoot at max quality just because you can
This will only help with new captures, naturally, but there are several options that can slow the Photos app’s ever-growing footprint. You’ll have to decide which sacrifices you’re willing to make – while 1080p videos are much smaller than ones in 4K, for example, you may regret the lower resolution if you want the sharpest possible picture on a 4K TV or aVision Proheadset.
Go toSettings > Camera, and use this checklist:
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Option 4: Purge your Recently Deleted and Screenshots folders
Restore space quickly
When you delete media from the Photos app, it isn’t automatically gone forever. Instead, it’s moved to the Recently Deleted folder, where a clock starts ticking down up to 40 days. This gives you a chance to recover something if you delete it by mistake, but also means that if you need more storage in a hurry, you might not get as much as you initially expect by deleting unwanted content.
To empty the Recent Deleted folder in iOS 18 or later:
If you want to purge the Recently Deleted folder entirely, simply chooseSelect > More > Delete All. Remember, though, that once something is wiped from this folder, it truly is gone – there’s no way of recovering it, except maybe with the help of a data recovery specialist. Even they may not be able to salvage anything.
Before or after you purge the Recently Deleted folder, you might also want to delete most or all of the files in your Screenshots folder. For many people, these images are only ever used temporarily, yet collectively they can take up hundreds of megabytes. In the Photos app, navigate toMedia Types > Screenshotsand tapSelect. Choose everything you’d like to get rid of, then tap thetrash canicon to complete the process.
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