How to free up storage space on Android
With ever advancing mobile technologies , nowadays smartphones have powerful processor, high resolution camera, faster network speed, more memory and yet as we install apps, take photos, shoot videos, storage memory gets filled over time.
So here are ways we can free up memory and make optimum use of our storage.
- Check your storage usage
First check what exactly is taking space in your android.
Go to Settings and click on storage.
It will display storage used by apps, pictures, videos, cached data etc.
- Uninstall unused Apps
An average app can take upto 50 MB after installation.
Uninstall old and unused apps or games, there will be the apps you are no longer using and games you are not playing or bored, especially games take lot of storage space, uninstall them.
- Move photos to cloud
Photos can take up lot of space on modern smartphones as they have high resolution cameras. A 12 MP image can be upto 3 MB in size ( depending on colors and compression).
Instead of storing them all on phone, use a app that automatically uploads to cloud storage like Google Photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Flickr etc.
- Remove large videos
A 5 minute HD video can be upto 100 MB in size ( depending on colors, compression and FPS) , a movie could be GBs. If videos are important, store them on your computer or other secure storage.
An unlimited number of photos at maximum 16 megapixels and videos at 1080p resolutions are stored for free using the "High quality" setting in Google Photos.
- Clear downloads folder
Downloads folder may contain lot of junk files as we download files, use them and forget. it also contain files downloaded by apps, so check for important files and clear others.
- Clear cached data
As we can see in storage usages, cached data can be gigabytes. Apps use cached data for efficiency and its a standard practice, but it keeps growing over time. Social media Apps like Facebook , Instagram stores hundreds of megabytes data as cache.
Best way is to clear less frequently used apps cached data individually. Go to the Settings→ Apps→ {App}→ Clear data.
- Clear Messaging app media files
Apps like WhatsApp, Google Allo stores received and sent photos, videos on device and keep growing over time. If we check file manager there will be folder in name of app and it contains media files from particular app, delete unnecessary files or there will be setting in particular app to stop downloading media files.
Uninstall old and unused apps or games, there will be the apps you are no longer using and games you are not playing or bored, especially games take lot of storage space, uninstall them.
Photos can take up lot of space on modern smartphones as they have high resolution cameras. A 12 MP image can be upto 3 MB in size ( depending on colors and compression).
Instead of storing them all on phone, use a app that automatically uploads to cloud storage like Google Photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Flickr etc.
Best way is to clear less frequently used apps cached data individually. Go to the Settings→ Apps→ {App}→ Clear data.