How to free up space without deleting photos
Deleting feels like the obvious move. It is usually the last one you should make. Most of what fills a phone can be shrunk instead.
Videos are the whole problem
A 4K clip at 60fps runs about 400 MB a minute. Ten minutes of your child's school play is four gigabytes — more than a thousand photos. Nothing else on your phone comes close.
Re-encoding a video at 1080p typically recovers 60–75% of its size, and on a phone screen it is genuinely hard to tell the difference. You keep the video. That is the trade most people would take if anyone offered it, and iOS simply does not.
Shoot smaller going forward: Settings → Camera → Record Video → 1080p at 30fps. You will not miss it, and you stop generating the problem.
Live Photos are two files
Every Live Photo is secretly two files — a still and a three-second video, and the video is most of the size. Turning one into an ordinary photo keeps the picture and drops the rest.
You can do it one at a time — open the photo, Edit, tap the LIVE badge, choose Off — but that only stops it playing; the video data stays. Actually removing it means re-saving the still, which is exactly why bulk tools exist for this.
Turn the default off if you never use them: Camera → Preserve Settings → Live Photo.
Offload apps you keep but do not open
Settings → General → iPhone Storage. Tap any large app and choose Offload App. The app goes, its documents and data stay, and the icon remains with a small cloud — tap it later and everything comes back.
Podcast, streaming and map apps are usually the worst offenders here, because they cache aggressively and never clean up after themselves. Offloading just one of those often recovers several gigabytes on its own.
The caches nobody mentions
- Safari: Settings → Safari → Clear History and Website Data. Often a full gigabyte if you have never once done it.
- Messages: Settings → Messages → Keep Messages → 1 Year. Photos and videos sitting in old threads are usually the biggest single store on a phone after the camera roll.
- Restart. It genuinely clears temporary files, and it is about the only lever you actually have over System Data.
Screenshots are the free win
They are tiny individually and enormous in aggregate, and almost nobody looks at one twice. Photos → Albums → Media Types → Screenshots, then Select All. It is the least painful deletion available, and most people have thousands.
Sift — Clean up photo storage. See what it does →