The Aeronauts’ Guide to iPhone Storage - Part 1
DUMPING THE FILES YOU DON’T NEED TO SAVE THE ONES YOU DO
A few years ago, Amazon Studios made a wonderful movie called The Aeronauts about the early days of ballooning in Victorian England. With Felicity Jones as the soul-searching balloon pilot and Eddie Redmayne as the explorer scientist, the pair battles storms and freezing cold to set an altitude record and discover the secrets of Earth’s atmosphere. All of which may sound a little unremarkable given the standard of current adventure films, but The Aeronauts is as engaging as any of that. And far more personal.
Because what goes up must come down, and through a series of nail biting events, the intrepid pair is faced with lightening their balloon of unnecessary baggage to survive.
And they face the question of what IS really necessary?
Your iPhone is a more down-to-earth example of the same conundrum, but no less traumatic for many of us.
When we buy our iPhones, storage space is the last thing we consider. Literally. On the order form. Adding to the cost of an already expensive device.
And when we do think about storage it’s natural to check how much space we’re using on our current phone. Then match that.
But the iPhone is a living thing, in a way, that grows with us. Our digital Sherpa.
Over time it gathers all this stuff we see and hear and collect and has to put them somewhere.
Eventually, if you choose to buy minimal storage overhead and add many files, you will see this.
When that happens, everyone’s first reaction is to dump photos. I get it. But before you do, let's take a look at the big picture. It’s likely there are better, less important files that can be tossed overboard to lighten your load. Files that will never be missed.
First, check your iPhone Storage in Settings. You’ll get a nice graph (give it time to process) that shows what’s using your storage space, and unless you take a lot of videos, it’s probably not your Pictures.
Among the usual suspects are:
Music - If you have an Apple Music subscription you may have downloaded music to play offline. Unless there are tracks that you’ve ripped from CD’s, you can offload the music and stream it or re-download as needed. One song is usually takes up the same storage as two or three photos, so you can get back a lot of space here if you’ve been downloading a lot of music over time.
Movies/TV Shows - Same thing. If you’ve downloaded shows to watch on a plane or you have a series set for automatic download, you may have a ton of opportunity by deleting them.
Podcasts - These are easy to set up for automatic download and can eat up space quickly. I had a client who unknowingly maxed out her iPhone storage just with podcasts.
Sometimes there are other random files - documents, .pdf’s, slide decks, etc. - that have found their way onto the iPhone. And as luck (and Apple) would have it, the iPhone Storage panel has an app-by-app list of the storage used for each application and its associated data. You can choose to delete the app, its data, or both. A perfect way to cull out those old apps you tried months ago and gave up on.
You can always redownload and start over.
Another workaround for oversized files is to move them to iCloud Drive. This is a great strategy for documents and downloads that ended up on your iPhone “just because.” Downloading from the internet can add up over time and most are either a one time view or don’t need the “close at hand” status of iPhone access and can be filed offline.
Which gets us back to photos and videos.
If you’ve successfully dodged the “out of space” debacle by offloading some of these other files, then good for you. You’ve slowed your descent without touching your irreplaceable pictures.
Take a bow.
But the fact that you got that storage warning at all means you’re still flirting with disaster.
You just bought some time.
In Part 2, we’ll look at the pictures themselves and uncover the traps that bloat your Photos Library along with some easy ways to avoid them.
You’ve got this.
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