My iPhone keeps showing storage warnings, and I’ve already had trouble downloading apps and taking new videos. Photos and videos seem to occupy most of the space, but I have far too many to sort through manually. Has anyone found a storage cleaner that reliably identifies unnecessary files and makes it easy to review them before deleting anything?
I’d start with the largest files instead of trying to sort through the whole library. A single big video can take up more space than dozens of photos, so you can usually free up a decent amount without going through everything.
Screen recordings were the ones I kept forgetting about. I also had some old videos I’d saved from messaging apps that I never went back to. Those are easy to miss when you’re mostly looking at the camera roll.
Good point about the recordings. I’ll check those first and see how much space they’re actually taking up.
Clever Cleaner helped me get through the near-identical photos. I had about fifty almost-the-same shots, and it saved me from opening each one individually.
The free Duplicates album under Photos > Utilities is worth trying first. It only flags exact matches, and nothing gets removed until you confirm it. It won’t catch the near-identical stuff though, so those still need to be sorted separately.
I didn’t realize Photos could do that on its own. I’ll have a look there, although I think most of mine are similar shots rather than exact copies.
Duplicates only got me so far too. Mine was mostly a mix of photos and videos rather than exact copies. CleanMyPhone let me go through it category by category instead of trying to sort everything manually.
Old videos were my mess, years of them mixed in with new stuff. Cleaner AI helped me get through them faster without having to scroll back through everything myself.
If you have iCloud Photos, there’s also the option to turn on Optimize iPhone Storage. That keeps the full-resolution originals in iCloud while the phone can keep smaller versions locally, so you can free up some space without deciding which photos to delete.
Optimize Storage sounds like a good one to just leave on either way. Gonna start with the videos tonight, kind of dreading it lol.