This Genius Trick Frees Up Space On Your Phone For More Travel Photos

When you’re enjoying the perfect vacation, you want to capture those one-of-a-kind memories to enjoy when you’re back home, and that means being snap happy on your camera or, more likely, your phone. But with that comes one major fear: running out of space. Here are some hacks to make sure that doesn’t happen on your next adventure.

In the Cloud

If you haven’t backed up your photos on the cloud already, you should. And you can also use online storage to save space on your device. On the iPhone, there’s a simple setting which ensures your phone optimizes the space in the cloud and minimizes the space taken up on your phone. Just go to settings, then iCloud, hit photos, and choose “optimize storage”.

It’s also worth checking you’re not double saving your iPhone photos. If you use the HDR mode or take photos on Instagram, there’s a chance you’re doubling up on your images. To stop HDR photos saving twice, go to settings, photos & camera, scroll to the bottom and uncheck “keep normal photo”. To stop this happening on Instagram, go to settings in the app and untick the “save original photos” box.

If you’re using an Android, the Google Photos app is your friend here. Simply open the app and go to settings, then turn on “back up & sync”. Now you can delete the images from your device while enjoying unlimited space with Google Photos.

Morning photos on Instagram can double up on your phone

Clean up your data

There are numerous things you can do to get rid of unnecessary data on your phone. If you get all of these are covered, you’ll have much more space for those precious photos.

Firstly, on the iPhone, you should be making sure text messages aren’t being stored forever. You can avoid this by going to settings > messages > message history and selecting “keep messages”. The default setting is forever, but by changing it to one year or less, you’ll ensure no old messages are taking up space.

You also need to clear your cache. On the iPhone browser, this is really easy to do. Go to settings and select Safari, scroll down and hit “clear history and website data”. If you use Chrome, you can delete the browsing data in the app by clicking the triple dot button in the top right and hitting history and then “clear browsing data”.

Organize your apps

It sounds obvious but one of the easiest ways to free up some space is to delete those apps you’ve barely used. That means the fitness tracking app you’re too guilty to open, the video game you never worked out how to play, and that magical-sounding organizer that was supposed to sort your life out. And if you’ve already deleted all the apps you don’t need, you can also delete the data created by those you do use. An easy way to do this is to uninstall the app and then reinstall it.

Now you have the space, you can take as many travel photos as you want

About the author

Peter Ward

Tech Editor

Peter was born in Birmingham, England and was raised in North Wales. He studied journalism at the University of Sheffield before moving to Dubai, where he worked for several business magazines. After three years in the Middle East, Peter moved to New York to earn his master's degree in business journalism from Columbia University Journalism School. He has since written for international publications such as Bloomberg, The Economist and Newsweek. In his spare time Peter loves to play and watch soccer, go to the movies, read, and play video games.