How to free up storage space on your smartphone

WHEN you have a smartphone with just 32 or 64 GB of memory, you have to be very careful with everything you store on the device, otherwise you can quickly run out of space. Even 128 GB can be tight, especially for video game lovers or budding video-makers. In any case, a cleanup is necessary from time to time to free up space on your smartphone.

To find out if you still have room to store new pictures or install other applications on your handset, go to the Storage section of your smartphone's Settings. If it's three quarters full, then it's time to take action before it fills up and makes it hard to take new photos or install apps.

Get into good habits

The best way to save space on your smartphone is to start by getting rid of the biggest files, primarily photos, videos and music amassed on the device. There are two solutions: move these files to your computer by connecting the two devices; or move them to the cloud via an online storage service. Finally, it's better to use a music streaming service to listen to your favorite artists rather than storing thousands of MP3 files on your phone.

You should also clear the cache and even the data stored by many applications, with the notable exception of games, as this could delete all your history and performance data. Social networks and messaging are particularly resource-intensive. To do this, you need to go to your smartphone Settings, then in the Applications section, choose one by one the apps you want to streamline. This will force you to log in to each service again, but it will give your storage space a welcome boost.

Finally, you should obviously delete any apps that you don't use anymore and delve into the Downloads to check if there are some files you can delete there too. And if that's not enough, rest assured, your smartphone has built-in tools to do the job.

Take a look at your smartphone settings

Each operating system has its own storage management tools. In Android, go to Settings and then Storage, where you'll be able to free up space by deleting unwanted files (mainly the system and application cache), as well as application data or duplicate files. It's also possible to delete all or some photos, videos and various large files on the smartphone. Be careful to make copies elsewhere if you don't want to lose them forever.

On iOS, go to the General tab and then to iPhone Storage. There, Apple suggests storing your images and various data directly in iCloud. As in Android, you can select the applications of your choice and delete all the relative data from your smartphone.