I've talked before on this blog about how much having low storage on an iOS device sucks. But the thing is that I never tried doing anything about it. I would constantly keep on clearing the caches of social media apps until things started working again, maybe deleting a small amount of images/videos. This worked short term, but I would have to do this multiple times a day.
Media Hog
The issue is that I've allowed too many images and videos to build up in my internal storage over the years. While I am a data hoarder (albeit, a bad one) who hates deleting things, I have to admit to having tons of junk images. There is so much junk media on my phone, such as:
- Screenshots of the lock screen I only took to remember the time
- 3 second screen recordings where I realized I wasn't ready (so the screen recording itself is useless)
- Screenshots I accidentally took when trying to turn off my phone
- Duplicate images from when I uploaded to Instagram stories
- Individual media from photo/video editing
- And more
Cleaning
Tools
Going through all of your images and videos manually is tedious, although definitely doable. Thankfully, there are some apps that can help make image cleaning easier:
Note that because I am using an iPhone, obviously these are going to be iPhone apps
- Swipewipe is definitely the most marketed of the photo cleaner apps. I'm only mentioning this one because you shouldn't use it. You can use it for free, but you can only clean so many images a day. The paid version is
$10a week! - Slidebox is the app I've used the most. Although it's more focused on organizing images into folders, it still allows you to quickly delete images, and I've gotten lots of use out of it. The free version has video ads that interrupt you, but if you decline the app data access you can use it without ads. You will still be interrupted by ad popups, but they will time out after failing to load. Additionally, if you know where to look, you can find modded
.ipafiles, giving you premium features for free. - Although more of an image manager than a cleaner, PhoTop is really handy, as it allows you to sort images such as various factors, such as size, resolution, and color.
Goals
So I started cleaning, and the main annoying factor is the amount of images that I have. When I started, I had combined over 20,000 images and videos, which is a lot if you think about it. As of writing, I'm still in the process of cleaning images.
You might think that I could sort by size, and delete the biggest images. While this does help, it would only get me so far. Most of my storage is taken up by medium sized images:
I knew that cleaning my camera roll would be a somewhat long-term goal, I couldn't knock it out in a week. Because I am bad with long-term goals, I decided to make a Beeminder goal for it, as this would force me to actually try. Here is that chart:
The goal is to try and remove 1.350 GB of images every week, although I might make any adjustments. Additionally, the cap is 1.350 GB of storage ahead, so if I free up more than that in a week, than the limit is adjusted. Once again, don't know how I feel about it, so I may remove it. The goal is to reach 20 GB.
Issues
The biggest issues so far have mainly been mentally. Although most of the images I have aren't important, to me they seem important. Although some images I can see how they could be important, I already know most aren't. For example, random screenshots of error screens, map screenshots, or when I saw a cool looking gradient on the music now playing screen.
Another thing I am still figuring out is media which is larger than it needs to be. When a crop a screenshot on iOS, the full screenshot is still saved, and can be restored in the image editor. This is nice, but I don't need this most of the time. Additionally, live photos can take up a lot of storage. I quit taking live photos about a year after I got an iPhone, but the live photos I do have still use a lot of storage. A way to get just a single frame without the rest of the live photos would be nice.