It’s easier than ever to capture the moments that matter with your iPhonefrom family reunions during the holidays to celebrating the New Year with friends and loved ones. While your phone certainly starts out with a lot of space, over time it fills up with photos, apps, and videos that take up all that storage space.
But before you panic, delete your vacation photos or shell out for a more expensive model, take a breath. You don’t need to lose a single memory to make room.
With a few built-in iOS features and lesser-known tricks, you can eliminate hidden clutter and reclaim storage without deleting the stuff you actually care about. It’s fast, it’s simple, and best of all, you already have the tools right in your settings.
Learn more: Change These 8 iOS 18 Settings Before Doing Anything Else
There are two built-in iOS settings that can help you clean up a significant amount of storage on your iPhone: one permanent and the other temporary. More free space will allow you install the latest software updatestake more photos and videos and download more apps. Here’s what you need to know.
If you want more tips on getting more storage on iPhone, check out Secret iOS Settings Every iPhone User Should Know and the best cloud storage options in 2025.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased technical content and lab reviews. Add CNET as your preferred Google source.
Optimize iPhone photos and videos to get more storage
If you want to preserve your precious memories (even just your screenshots of memes) but also want to free up storage space, the easiest way is to optimize the photos and videos already stored on your device.
By default, every time you take a photo or video, it is saved at full resolution on your device. If you capture photos and videos in the highest resolution possible, they can take up a lot of space. One minute of video shot in 4K at 60 fps takes up about 400 MB, or almost half a gigabyte. This is quite significant.
To optimize your photos and videos, go to Settings > Pictures and activate Optimize iPhone storage (for this to work you will need to have the iCloud Photos setting above activated). Depending on how many photos and videos you have on your iPhone, this may take a little while, but once finished, you should see a lot more storage space on your device.
For this to work, you need to enable the iCloud Photos setting.
All your full-resolution photos and videos are then transferred to your iCloud, while smaller, lower-resolution versions are kept on your device, taking up less space. If you want to access your higher resolution photos and videos, you can go to the Photos app and upload any file that is being optimized; this requires a decent internet connection. Your recently taken photos and videos can exist in full resolution, so you won’t need to upload every photo or video.
If you don’t have enough iCloud storage, it’s easier to upgrade your cloud than to buy a new phone. In the US, you can upgrade to 50 GB for just a dollar per month, or you can go further: 200 GB for $3 per month or 2 TB for $10 per month. Prices vary depending on your country or region.
To upgrade your iCloud on your iPhone, go to Settings > (your name) > iCloud > Manage account storage > Buy more storage. Choose a plan, then follow the instructions. If you upgrade to a paid iCloud subscription, you’ll have access to iCloud+, which also offers iCloud Private Relay and Hide My Email features.
You can spend as little as $1 per month for more iCloud storage.
Offload your largest apps to save storage space on iPhone
You don’t use all the apps stored on your iPhone. Many of them remain there, like apps for airlines, third-party cameras, and music production. Even if you use these apps occasionally, you probably don’t need daily access to most of them. This is why you should consider offloading apps, especially when you desperately need storage.
Let’s say you want to download and install the latest iOS update. If it’s a major update, like iOS 16, you may need a little more than 5 GB to install the software. If it’s a one-time update, like iOS 16.1, you’re looking at around 1GB. And if you don’t have enough storage to update, you can quickly offload apps, which is a happy medium between keeping and deleting your apps.
Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and check which apps are taking up the most storage. Some built-in apps like Photos and Messages can’t be offloaded, so be warned. If you find a large app you want to download, tap it and tap Download the application. Wait a bit and the app should then be removed offline, while your documents and data will remain saved on your device.
You need to tap Offload App twice to “delete” the app.
If you need temporary storage, to download software, simply go through the list and unload all possible applications. The amount discharged for each application varies, but you should see the number next to Application size. Delete the number next to Documents & Data, as it will remain on your device. The only way to get rid of it is to delete the app.
Offload as many apps as needed until you have enough storage. You can’t use an offloaded app, but if you want to recover an app, go to your app library and tap the iCloud button to redownload it. If the offloaded app is on your home screen, just tap it to download it. You won’t need to log in again or anything; you will have access to the application as if it had never been deleted.
