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Running out of space on your iPhone? Here are eight tips to help you quickly and easily free up space

Running out of space on your iPhone (or for that matter iPad)? Did you think 16GB would be enough, but now feel like you have space for nothing? Here are a bunch of tips to help you get the most from your storage.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer on April 23, 2016

Are you running out of space on your iPhone (or iPad)? Are you starting to feel like you're going to have to delete your existing data to make space for new apps? Feel like just deleting a bunch of stuff randomly to make more room?

Stop!

Before you go deleting potentially precious data like photos or notes, here are some tips to help you make the most from the storage space you have on your device.

#1: FIND OUT WHAT'S USING UP YOUR STORAGE!

First off, find out what's eating your data!

Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage to see how much space each app is taking.

#2: DELVING DEEPER INTO STORAGE

There's more to the Manage Storage screen than first meets the eye. If you click on the arrow next to one of the apps listed you can see how much data is used by the app itself, and how much additional space is being used by documents & data.

Here you get to see not only the size of the app, but also the amount of data it's storing. You might find some real surprises here (for example, innocuous things such as stored iMessage messages can eat up a crazy amount of space).

You might also find that some apps that stream data are caching a lot of data that you can also safely delete, either from the app, or by just deleting and redownloading the app in question.

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#3: DELETE UNNECESSARY APPS

Get rid of any apps that you don't use. Especially anything big like games or mapping software, which can take up hundreds of gigabytes.

Just press and hold until the icons start to jiggle, then tap the X in the top-right corner to delete.

If there's something you only use occasionally then remember that you can always redownload it from the Apple App Store.

#4: RELY ON STOCK APPS

Get used to using Mail, Calendar, Safari and such. These are on your device and you can't remove them so you might as well make use of them. Also, remember that any alternative apps you download to use instead of them is just going to consume precious megabytes.

#5: BUY EXTERNAL STORAGE

Did you know you add to your iPhone or iPad storage just as easily as plugging in a cable or connecting to a Wi-Fi router? You can either buy a flash drive that will connect to your device's Lightning port or connect to an external storage device wirelessly.

#6: REDUCE YOUR PHOTO BULK

There are a number of things you can do with photos beyond just deleting them to make space.

First off, consider offloading the bulk of your photos to a cloud storage provider such as Dropbox or Flickr, if you're an Amazon Prime customer, Amazon Prime Photos.

If you need to keep photos on your device then a great app to use is Photo Cleaner, which will allow you to delete and compress photos and video. For $0.99 you get the ability to compress an unlimited number of files.

Also, keep your photos simple. The Live Photos feature on the new handsets is particularly heavy on storage.

#7: SIGN UP FOR ITUNES MATCH

iTunes Match allows you to stream music to your device rather than having it all stored on your device. This is a real space saver, although the service does cost money.

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#8: CLOUD STORAGE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND

Whether that cloud storage service you choose be iCloud, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive or whatever else takes your fancy, every megabyte you can move from your device to the cloud is a megabyte saved for apps or other data.

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