The biggest storage hog on my Android wasn’t photos — I never would have guessed what it was

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My phone had been throwing the same low storage warning for weeks, so I went straight to the gallery. That is always where I check first, because photos, videos, and screenshots are usually the first things that eat up space. But this time, the gallery didn’t account for all of it. The numbers were pointing somewhere else, and it was not a place I had ever thought to look in.

I almost cleared my camera roll

One tap away from the wrong fix

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseofCredit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseof

I opened the gallery and started with the easiest things to remove: old screenshots, duplicate photos, and videos I wouldn’t miss if they were gone. But before I deleted anything, I checked the storage breakdown to see how much space it would free up.

The gallery was using space, but it was clearly not the whole problem. Telegram was sitting on 4.74GB, with WhatsApp not far behind. Prime Video, Netflix, and even Google Maps were using a surprising amount of storage. I used all of those apps regularly, so they never looked like the problem. I was ready to cut into my camera roll before I realized I was about to fix the wrong problem.

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