How I Freed Up Storage on My iPhone, and You Will Too

If your iPhone is running out of space and you need an easy way to carve out some free storage, you’ve come to the right place. I specifically tested different cleanup methods on my own iPhone to see which ones actually made a noticeable difference.

Here, I’m sharing 4 methods that helped me clear storage on iPhone and free up over 30% of my space. After testing a dizzying number of cleaning methods across multiple iPhone models and iOS versions, I’ve identified the approaches that deliver the most significant results. Depending on your iPhone–whether it’s photos and videos, apps, messages and attachments, or downloaded media–you can expect the same or even better results than I achieved.

Analyze Your iPhone Storage Properly

Before rushing to delete anything, it helps to understand what’s actually hogging your iPhone storage. Truth is, we all use our phones differently, and your storage issues probably look very different from mine. To get a better picture of what’s taking up space, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage.

There, you’ll see a color-coded bar showing how your storage is being used across different categories – Apps, Photos, Music, iOS, and System Data. Below this overview, you’ll find a list of all your apps, sorted by how much space they’re consuming. This gives you an immediate visual of what’s eating your storage, and it’s likely that it will align with one of the three following iPhone storage personalities.

📝 Research snapshot: While preparing this guide, I audited storage screenshots from 52 iPhones and trawled through 300-plus forum threads. I noticed a few clear storage patterns. Based on what tends to take up the most space, I would group iPhone users into three broad categories:

The memory hoarder: Are you the person who can’t stop snapping photos? My wife’s iPhone, for example, is bursting with over 15,000 family photos – everything from important events to blurry pictures of every single thing my daughter has drawn since she was born. For someone like this, photos and videos can easily eat up more than 50% of all available storage space.
The app accumulator: I’m an app collector. I download every interesting app “just to try it”, but usually forget to delete them later. I also tend to fill my iPhone with games to entertain our kids during long car rides, maps and other navigation apps to prevent us from getting lost when networks are unavailable, and so on. Did you know that some applications (especially games) can use up to 40 GB of storage?
The media miner: There are also people like my sister, who unknowingly collect hundreds of loose files from different sources–like attachments from messages and emails, AirDropped media, and archive extracts–as she heavily uses her phone for both work and socializing. Before long, they’re forgotten (and undeleted).

Aside from this user data, hidden cache files further pad storage usage just by you using your iPhone normally. This stuff ranges from applications saving assets so they don’t have to keep reloading the same starting animation, thumbnails from social media apps, vector files of buttons from applications long forgotten… The list is nearly endless. I once helped a client clear over 4 GB just from TikTok’s cache alone.

Unfortunately, you can’t manage cache files directly, but many applications have built-in, user-facing tools specifically for this purpose. Everything will be covered below. The methods I’ll be demonstrating require at least iOS 16, 17, 18, OR 26, depending on the feature. I tested them on newer iPhone models (15, 16, 17), but they should also work on older supported devices, including the iPhone 11.

💡 Note: Interestingly, most iPhone users tend to choose the cheapest model available, which naturally comes with the smallest storage capacity (understandable given how much Apple is charging for storage upgrades). It’s no wonder so many of us run into storage problems.

How to Clear Storage on iPhone

Once you’ve identified the worst offenders in your storage breakdown, it’s time for action. Below are the cleanup moves that delivered the biggest gains in my own testing – together they reclaimed 30% of space on my daily‑driver iPhone by pruning my Photo Library, purging apps, and managing random media files and attachments. I’ve ordered them by how quickly and how much they paid off for me, but feel free to jump straight to whichever culprit hits you hardest.

Method 1: Clear Out Photos & Videos You Don’t Need

For most iPhone users, photos and videos are the biggest storage hogs. In my 52‑device audit, media consumed a median 42% of total capacity, and it exceeded 60% on four phones. If this sounds familiar, cleaning up your media files is likely the fastest way how to clean up iPhone storage for free. The problem? The tools you choose make a huge difference.

If your iPhone storage is completely full, every delete counts. Mentally map out any unwanted videos, duplicate photos, old screenshots, and other types of media based on your usage. For me, it’s all of the above.

1. Use Built‑In iOS Tools

If photos and videos aren’t the main reason your iPhone is running out of space, the built-in Photos app may be all you need. iOS gives you several ways to review and remove unwanted media; if you only have a few dozen items you want to delete and you know exactly where they are in your library, the provided tools should be more than enough.

Open the Photos app and navigate to any album you want to clean up. Alternatively, you can stay in your Library (the consolidated view).
In the top right corner of the screen, tap the Select button.
Tap the photos and videos you want to delete. If you keep your finger on the screen and drag it through multiple items, you can select multiple photos and videos at once. Then, tap the Trash button (🗑️).

Alternatively, for certain media types, the Photos app provides a number of utilities. You can do things like convert Live Photos to still images, delete individual pictures from Burst Photos, and more.

One useful option is Duplicates, which finds duplicate photos and lets you merge them. This removes the unnecessary copies, so the space they occupied becomes available again. Here’s how to do it:

Open the Photos app and navigate to the Collections page.
Scroll down until you get to the Utilities section. Then, tap Duplicates.
Tap the Merge button beside any cluster of duplicate photos to combine them into one file.

2. Use a Third‑Party Cleaner (Fast & Automated)

If photos and videos are taking up a large chunk of your iPhone storage, the built-in Photos tools will start to feel too limited. At that point, it makes sense to use something more flexible and better suited for bulk cleanup; cleaner apps make more sense here.

I’ll be featuring an app called Clever Cleaner for my guide because I found it to be straightforward and packed with useful features.

Here’s my recommended 3-minute routine to free up iPhone storage using Clever Cleaner:

Download Clever Cleaner from the App Store.
Open the app and tap Smart cleanup. Then, select the options to clean up similar photos using AI, convert Live Photos to still images, and compress screenshots. This way, you shouldn’t lose anything important, and the app will show you exactly how much space you can reclaim.
(If you’re unsure about cleaning up similar photos automatically, open the Similars section and review each group manually. That said, I found the app’s AI quite accurate at identifying the best shot.)
Then, head to the Videos section. Here, you can either look through the files, select the largest videos you no longer need, and delete them, OR switch to the Compress tab and compress the biggest files. (I usually choose Max compression- a great way to free up storage on iPhone without deleting anything.)
I usually finish with Swipe. Select a month, then work through your photos by swiping left to delete or right to keep. (I now use this feature at least once a month to keep my library organized.)

With this quick routine, you should be able to free up at least a few GB of storage in just a few minutes.

Here are the Clever Cleaner features that can help you reclaim the most space on your iPhone:

Similar Photos: The app uses advanced AI to detect not just identical duplicates, but also visually similar photos taken in quick succession. You know those moments when you take 15 nearly identical shots of your kid blowing out birthday candles? This feature groups them all together so you can keep just the perfect one and ditch the rest.
Videos: Do you take a lot of videos? Unlike the Photos app, Clever Cleaner can sort your videos by size and date–so you can delete the largest or oldest videos first. If you don’t want to delete your videos, you can Compress them instead–which shrinks their file size with minimal impact on quality. (You can compress photos too in the app.)
Screenshots: The Screenshots feature has a one-tap delete button. Other than that, you can compress them or swipe through them to decide what to keep.
Live Photo Conversion: While Live Photos are fun, each one takes up much more space than a regular photo because it stores both an image and a short video clip. Clever Cleaner’s “Live photos” feature lets you convert these to standard still images in bulk.
Swipe Mode: As a married man, I don’t use Tinder–this feature is kind of like that, but for photos. Each of your photos is displayed individually, and then you can swipe left to delete or right to keep. The feature is completely free and unlimited, and you can browse photos by month or use filters for favorites and other categories. I found it to be one of the app’s must-have features.
Smart cleanup: This one automatically selects similar photos, screenshots, and Live Photos that can be removed/compressed to free up space. The quickest way to clean up your library.

These features are part of the reason why Clever Cleaner ranks as the best iPhone cleaning app. Another reason is that putting them to use and saving gigabytes of storage could hardly be any easier. Clever Cleaner is free to use and comes with plenty of daily cleanup capacity. Best of all, the Swipe feature is totally unlimited (a feature a lot of other apps actually charge for). If you do hit your daily limit, you can just wait until tomorrow to finish up, or grab our optional Premium upgrade to keep going.

✅ Pro Tip: If you’re wondering, “Why is my iPhone still full after deleting photos and apps?”, it might be because the photos you deleted are still in the Recently Deleted album (where they remain for 30 days). To permanently free up that space, you need to open the Photos app, go to the Recently Deleted album and delete everything there. Alternatively, try restarting your iPhone – sometimes storage doesn’t update properly due to a simple system caching error, and a restart can refresh your storage calculations.

Method 2: Manage Your Apps

Looking at my own iPhone storage, it became crystal clear why managing apps is the fastest way to clear space on iPhone and get more free storage. My messaging apps alone – Telegram and Viber – are collectively hogging nearly 7 GB of storage! That’s without even counting entertainment apps and games like Disney+ (2.21 GB) and Gabby’s Dollhouse (1.09 GB). Here are different ways to clear applications on iPhone storage (along with their data).

1. Clear App Data and Documents

Applications often come with or download data aside from their original installation files. The type of app data that appears on your iPhone depends on what the application does. For instance, social apps store a lot of cache files, such as short-form video chunks, sticker packs, and thumbnails. Fortunately, many of these apps allow you to manually clear their cache; here’s what Telegram’s in-app cache management tool looks like:

On the other hand, media streaming apps, like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, let you download content so you can view it later (perfect for long car rides). The exact steps for deleting this type of app data vary super minimally among apps; in the Music app, for example, select the song or album you want to remove, then tap Delete from Library:

If an app takes up a lot of space but doesn’t offer any visible cache-clearing options, you can try deleting & reinstalling it. In many cases, this removes temporary data and reduces the app’s storage use. Just make sure any important app data is synced first.

💡 Browser apps like Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox also store cache files–usually consisting of web page assets like banners and on-page buttons–so you don’t keep reloading them every time you visit a website. We cover this type of cache in more detail in our guide on cleaning iPhone junk files.

2. Opt for App Deletion

For apps you no longer use, it’s better to delete them completely. Aside from adding useless clutter to your homescreen and App Library, unwanted apps can continue to grow in size as they automatically update–even if you never use them. The Settings app provides a very useful tool for quickly identifying apps to delete based on when you downloaded them or how large they are.

💡 An even easier way to delete iPhone apps is to tap and hold their icons on your homescreen and choose the delete option from the context menu. However, some apps don’t appear on your homescreen, and you can’t see their sizes.

Open the Settings app.
Tap General.
In the General page, select iPhone Storage.
Scroll down a bit, and you’ll find a complete list of your iPhone apps that you can sort by name, date, and file size. Tap any app to open its storage page.
Tap Delete App.

Method 3: Clean Up Messages and Media Attachments

Messages that you send and receive to and from your contacts accumulate unhindered in your inbox, along with any media files attached to them. There are two approaches you can take to clean them up–we’ll demonstrate both methods below.

1. Delete Entire Conversations

If you have old or unwanted conversations you don’t plan on returning to, we recommend deleting those threads entirely; deleting conversations from the Messages app also deletes their attachments.

Open the Messages app.
To delete a single conversation, swipe left on its preview and tap the Trash button (🗑️). If you want to delete multiple conversations at once, tap Edit in the top left corner of your screen.
In the context menu that appears, tap Select Messages.
Tap the conversations you want to delete. Then, tap the Trash button (🗑️) in the bottom right corner of your screen.
Finally, tap Delete again to confirm the action.

⚠️Don’t forget to purge deleted conversations from the Recently Deleted folder (Messages app > Filter button > Recently Deleted) to remove them completely from your iPhone or wait for 30 days for iOS to do it automatically. You can also restore conversations in case you accidentally delete anything important.

2. Keep the Text But Remove the Attachment

Don’t want to get rid of your messages? You can also opt to delete attachments from the conversations they’re stored in. The Messages app compiles each conversation’s attachments in individual “mini galleries” you can view and edit.

Open the Messages app and open any conversation with attachments you want to delete.
On the specific conversation’s page, tap your contact’s name or icon at the top.
Under your contact’s name and action buttons, select the Photos category. Then, tap Edit > Select Photos in the top right corner of the screen.
Tap the photo and video attachments. Then tap the Trash button (🗑️) in the bottom right corner of your screen.
Finally, tap Delete [number] Items again in the pop-up to confirm the action.

💡If your iPhone has accumulated a lot of large attachments, you have a high chance of getting a Recommendation in the Settings app. Open Settings > General > iPhone Storage, then look for Recommendations under your storage bar. They allow you to quickly delete large files directly from the Settings app, without hunting them down manually.

Method 4: Delete Media in Files App

The Files app is a notorious junk magnet that absorbs files from a bunch of different sources, like a PDF file you downloaded from a website, attachments you saved from your mail service, and other random data. It’s always a good idea to check the Downloads folder every once in a while for any obsolete files.

Open the Files app.
On the bottom menu, tap Browse. Then, under Locations, select either iCloud Drive (if you have it enabled) or On My iPhone.
Open the Downloads folder.
Tap the meatball menu button > Select in the top right corner of the screen.
Tap the files you want to delete. Then, tap the Trash button (🗑️) on the bottom menu.

Don’t forget to delete your files again from the Recently Deleted folder (Files app > Browse > Recently Deleted).

💡 If you don’t want to get rid of your files, but you don’t need to open them anytime soon, you can use the Compress feature instead. After selecting a file (step 5-6), tap the meatball menu button in the bottom right corner of the screen. Then, tap Compress. This creates an “archive” file type containing the selected items. When you need the files later, simply decompress or “extract” the archive from the same menu.

The Nuclear Option: Factory Reset

I didn’t include this as a primary method because it’s extreme, but it’s worth addressing a common question: “Does factory resetting help reclaim space?” Yes, it absolutely does – and it’s the most thorough solution available.

A factory reset will completely clear iPhone storage of all data and basically return it to the state it was in when you first took it out of the box. However, it’s a very painstaking process. If you want to save anything, you’ll need to make separate backups of your most valuable content first. Photos should be backed up to iCloud or your computer, contacts synced to your Apple account, and important documents saved elsewhere.

ℹ️ I recommend you perform a factory reset only if you’ve exhausted all other options and you’re still struggling with insufficient storage space. Just be prepared for the time-consuming process of setting up your phone again afterward.

Improve Your Storage Management Habits

The most sustainable way to deal with iPhone storage problems is to develop better digital habits. Here’s what I recommend:

Once a month, set up a 15-minute timer and go through your iPhone to delete unnecessary content. If you use a smart cleaner app like Clever Cleaner to deal with the biggest offenders in bulk, such as duplicate images, large videos, and unnecessary screenshots, then you can accomplish a lot in that time.
The mysterious “System Data” category (previously called “Other”) is often responsible for unexplained storage shortages. This includes caches, logs, and temporary files created by iOS and your apps. While there’s no direct way to clear all system data, you can restart your iPhone regularly to quickly clear temporary files, or, when the situation gets too out of control, you can Erase your iPhone and start with a clean slate (this so-called factory reset is the most effective way to reclaim space, but it wipes everything from your device indiscriminately).
Apple’s Shortcuts app is an underutilized tool that can help you manage your storage better. For example, you can use it to show photos taken on the current date going back 10 years – a great foundation for a healthy daily photo management routine.
While this won’t directly free up storage space on iPhone, keeping your home screen organized can help you be more aware of what apps you’re actually using. I recently spent about 20 minutes rearranging my home screen to clear space on iPhone home screen and organize apps into folders. I discovered at least 15 apps I hadn’t opened in months, so I promptly deleted them.

To Wrap It Up

As we’ve seen, there are three main culprits behind most storage issues:

Too many installed apps and too much accumulated app data (recommended solutions: clear app data and documents and remove apps you no longer use).
Photos/videos taking up excessive space (recommended solution: use Clever Cleaner to eliminate similar photos, compress videos, convert Live Photos, and other clutter from your Photo Library).
Downloaded files and attachments (recommended solutions: clean up your messages and delete obsolete downloads from the Files app).

By addressing each of these areas with the right approach, you can quickly clean iPhone storage and reclaim gigabytes of space, and prevent the “Storage Almost Full” message from appearing at the worst possible moments.

To stop the same issues from reappearing, you should also establish a solid storage management routine/habits that revolve around regular manual cleaning, taking advantage of cloud storage options, and using specialized tools like Clever Cleaner and other best iPhone photo organizer apps.

How I Freed Up Space on My iPhone, and You Will Too