The Genius Way I Cleared the Dreaded ‘iPhone Storage Is Full’ Message

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If you’ve ever managed files on your computer, you know it can be, for the most part, very simple. There are drives, and in those drives are folders. In those folders are files. You can open them up, move them around and (barring some special circumstances) delete what you don’t need. It’s easy to organize in specific ways, by file size, for instance, to make managing them that much easier.

Plug an Android phone into your computer, and you’ll find much of the same. There are folders and files, making it quick and easy to transfer or back up data and clean out the large files filling up your phone.

But if you plug in an iPhone, all bets are off. Can anything be done to make managing files on an iPhone easier? The answer is yes… sort of.

The problem

My wife recently got the dreaded warning messages that her iPhone storage was full. Apple helpfully shows how much storage is occupied by different types of data. If you’ve ever faced a similar warning, you’ve probably noticed that a great deal of that space is photos and videos. That was the case for my wife, and I figured a quick sweep to delete the biggest ones, often 4K resolution, would free up plenty of space.

That turned out to be true, but the process of clearing them out turned into more of a hassle than I expected.

Cleaning up your iPhone’s storage can prove tricky.

Mark Knapp/CNET

Accessing files on the iPhone

Getting to the files on an iPhone isn’t too difficult. You can browse them freely on the phone itself, though it’s not always readily apparent when a file is on the iPhone or actually stored in iCloud and just visible on the phone. This is a fairly slow way to manage files. Even worse, Apple doesn’t provide a way to quickly see which files are the largest. So, making a quick sweep of large, unnecessary files is not possible. The best that can be done here is to simply view only videos and sift through them one by one.

Alternatively, you can plug an iPhone into a computer. After accepting a prompt…

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