How to increase GB on iPhone

One of the most frequent problems that iPhone owners have to deal with is the lack of space on the device memory which, as known, cannot be permanently expandable via memory card as it is possible to do on many Android terminals.

If you have purchased an “iPhone by” model with limited space, unfortunately you have to learn to live with it and optimize your habits of use of the device with a view to saving: because even a few tens of MB can be worth gold when you have a few GB available for file and application storage. Not to mention the iOS operating system updates that can require a lot of free memory to download and install.

So here I am, ready to help you and show you how to increase GB on iPhone through some simple common sense operations that will help you live more peacefully with your phone. Don’t expect secret techniques or magic formulas, but if you put everything below into practice I promise you will free up a lot of space. Have a good reading!

Index

• Apps, games and data
  • Delete unnecessary apps and games
  • Clear your online browsing data
  • Clear the app data
• Photo and video
  • Save photos and videos to your PC
  • Store photos and videos on the cloud
• Music
  • Use music streaming services
• Other useful tips …

Apps, games and data

Trivial as it may seem, one of the simplest ways to increase GB on iPhone is to locate applications and games that take up the most space on the phone memory and delete them.

Delete unnecessary apps and games

To find out which applications are “heavier”, go to the iOS Settings by pressing the appropriate gear icon on the Home or in the App Library and access the General> iPhone Space menu . In this screen, you can see the GB occupied and those still free, through a convenient explanatory bar.

Wait a few seconds, until a list of all the apps installed on the device appears in order of size, that is, the space occupied on the iPhone memory. To delete one, all you have to do is select the name of the app and press the Delete app button on the screen that opens, twice in a row.

Some applications offer the opportunity to free up space without the need to delete them. In some cases, in fact, a menu called Documents will appear , under which there are all the files saved within the application. Tap on the Edit button , then on that (-) to delete the individual documents saved in the app.

You can also choose to remove the application without losing its data, recovering it once it is reinstalled. The space you will save, however, will only be that referred to the App Dimensions . To do so, tap the Remove app only item .

Apps such as those of social networks tend to accumulate cache files which over time make their size abnormal. To solve the problem you can delete and install them again by downloading them from the App Store : in this way you will free up space on the iPhone without doing without Facebook or other social applications.

From the iPhone Space screen , you also have the opportunity to enable the Remove apps you don’t use option . This function removes the apps you haven’t used for a long time, without however deleting data and documents (which, however, are usually the ones that take up the most memory space).

Clear your online browsing data

The Safari browser also accumulates a lot of temporary data, but in this case you can get rid of it without deleting the app. Just go to the iOS Settings , select the Safari icon from the menu that opens and press the item Clear website data and history .

Warning: This will erase the history and website data not only from your iPhone, but also from all devices associated with your Apple ID . Other Safari contents that take up a lot of space are those contained in the reading list , i.e. in the web pages archived for later consultation.

To clear the Safari reading list, go back to the app list in General> iPhone Space and select the Safari icon . Once this is done, swipe left on the Offline reading list and tap the red Delete button . Simple, isn’t it?

Clear the app data

There are also a couple of other techniques that could allow you to free up space on your iPhone in an unexpectedly simple way. The first is to connect the phone to the PC via USB cable and manage the files contained in the apps that support the file sharing function: to do this on Windows you need iTunes , on macOS you can do everything from the Finder , that is the file manager. which is pre-installed in the operating system.

Go, therefore, to the internal memory of the iPhone by clicking on the phone-shaped icon in the left menu of iTunes or Finder, then access the File Sharing section to check for “heavy” files in the applications installed on the iPhone that allow the transfer of documents from the PC (e.g. text editor, file manager, office app).

To check the presence of these files, click on the name of each app in the box that appeared on the screen and if you find useless files that take up a lot of space, delete them by pressing the Delete key on the keyboard, then click on the Delete item .

Alternatively you can give a “clean” to all the cache files on the phone using applications such as PhoneClean which is paid (costs just under 20 euros) but is available in a free trial version that lets you know how much space you can recover by deleting the cache data. It is available for both Windows and macOS .

Photo and video

Other content that takes up a lot of space on iPhone are photos and videos , so I recommend that you remove them frequently from your device by storing them safely on your PC. The procedure to be followed is within everyone’s reach.

Save photos and videos to your PC

If you are using a Windows PC you must connect the iPhone to the PC using the Lightning cable or Dock supplied with the phone and wait for the autoplay menu to appear on the screen . At this point, click on the option Import images and videos . If it does not appear automatically, go to This PC Windows , then click with the right mouse button on the connected iPhone icon.

All you have to do is choose the Import images and videos item from the pop-up menu. So make sure there is a check mark next to Review, organize and group the items to import and click the Import button .

Subsequently, choose whether to assign names to the groups of photos present on the terminal (which normally have as their name the dates in which they were created), assign them tags and click on Import to complete the operation.

If you encounter any difficulties you can deepen the subject and find more detailed instructions on the subject in my tutorial on how to download photos from iPhone.

Do you use a Mac ? In this case, for managing images and videos, the main application to use is Photos : open it, then connect your iPhone and you can see the photos and videos on your smartphone directly in the gallery the program .

To import content to your Mac, select the content you are interested in and click Import xx Items , located at the top right. In case you want to import each photo / video, click on the Import all new elements button , always present at the top right.

Store photos and videos on the cloud

There is also a way to lighten the load of photos on the iPhone a little without deleting the images from the device: activate iCloud Photos and its space optimization function, which allows you to keep a “lighter” version of images and videos by downloading the full resolution ones (which in the meantime are stored on iCloud) only when necessary.

Furthermore, by activating iCloud Photos , the photos in the Photo Stream folder are no longer downloaded to the phone (which remains active for synchronizing images on other devices) and all videos and images stored in the cloud are automatically synchronized on all devices. connected to your Apple account.

To activate iCloud Photos and its space optimization function, go to the iOS Settings menu , press your name , go to iCloud> Photos , set the iCloud Photos item to ON and put the check mark next to the Optimize item iPhone space .

The only negative side of iCloud Photos – if we want to call it that – is that it consumes iCloud storage space , so to use it you have to subscribe to one of the paid plans of the service: the basic one is 0.99 euros / month to have 50 GB of storage. To learn more, check out my guide on how to store photos on iCloud .

If you do not intend to take out a paid subscription for iCloud, you can turn to Google Photos , a Google app that allows you to store photos and videos online on Google Drive.

On Google Photos , once you have completed the login with your Google account , you can choose whether to upload the content in High Quality ( maximum 16 MP for photos and maximum 1080p resolution for videos), or in Original Quality .

As for the storage space, you have 15 GB of free space on your Google account, which once filled, can be expanded at a cost of 1.99 euros / month for 100 GB , 2.99 euros / month for 200 GB and 9.99 euros / month for 2 TB .

Music

Another certainly effective method to increase GB on iPhone is to disable the automatic synchronization of the iTunes music library and to import only the albums or songs that you listen to often on the phone.

To select the songs to import to the iPhone, connect the phone to the PC and wait for iTunes to start , then select the phone icon from the menu located at the top. Choose the Music item from the software sidebar and activate the Playlists, selected artists, albums and genres option . Then put the check mark next to the contents you want to transfer to the iPhone and that’s it.

On Mac, the procedure is almost the same, but you will have to use the Finder, so select the icon corresponding to the name of your iPhone , press the Music button in the top bar and click on Playlists, artists, albums and selected genres to choose which ones exclude from the internal memory of your device.

Use music streaming services

Alternatively, you could lighten up your music library by relying on streaming services like Apple Music , Spotify , Amazon Music, and YouTube Music , which allow you to listen to music directly online. If you sign up for a subscription that generally starts at € 9.99 / month , there is also the opportunity to download your favorite songs offline.

Another very interesting feature, in this case only from Apple Music, is that it integrates perfectly with the iCloud Music Library , a free service that allows you to upload your favorite music to the cloud and have it synchronized on all your devices. If you want to know more, check out my tutorial on how to download music on iPhone

Other useful tips …

Finally, remember that you can virtually expand the space available on iPhone using cloud storage services such as Dropbox (with 2GB of free online space), Google Drive (with 15GB of free space) and Microsoft OneDrive (which offers 5GB of free space).

Starting with iOS 14, the Files app has built-in native support for USB storage devices , for use via Lightning USB adapters . Be aware that these devices, however, must have only one data partition and must be formatted in one of the following formats: FAT , FAT32 , exFAT or APFS .

Once the unit is connected to the USB input of the iPhone, go to the File app , then locate the connected device in the Locations section . You can save files and documents in external memory by pressing the share icon (shaped like an arrow inside a square), then selecting the Save to File item . From the menu that appeared on the screen, choose the location corresponding to the external storage device, then tap the Save button . 

As for iOS updates , remember that if you don’t have enough space on your iPhone to install them via OTA (i.e. directly from the Internet), you can connect your smartphone to your PC and install them via iTunes or Finder .

This way the update will be downloaded to your PC and therefore will require less free space on your smartphone. If you want to know more, read my tutorial on how to update iPhone .