We’ll show you five ways to get more storage on your iPhone. Most of these methods involve the manual deletion of certain types of photos, which can quickly reduce the space they take up. While it might take some time, these solutions give instant results without costing you anything.
All photos and videos in your gallery are stored in full, high-resolution format, which takes up much space on your iPhone. You can enable the ‘Optimize iPhone Storage’ feature to reduce storage usage. This setting moves the full-resolution files to iCloud while keeping only smaller thumbnails on your device. Whenever you need a photo or video, iCloud will download the full version automatically. This method is ideal if you want to free up space quickly without manually deleting photos.
Keep in mind that iCloud offers only 5 GB of free storage. If 5 GB of free storage isn’t enough for your photo library, you’ll need to upgrade to iCloud+, which offers additional storage plans starting at 50 GB.
If you’d rather not pay for extra iCloud storage, no problem. Below, we’ll share four free ways to free up space in your iPhone’s photo storage.
Some photos in your iPhone’s Photos app take up more storage than they should—duplicates are a prime example. These can appear due to multiple device syncs, restored backups, or repeated downloads. Keeping identical copies is unnecessary and wastes space, so deleting these duplicates is a simple way to free up storage.
Starting with iOS 16, iPhones include a built-in tool that automatically detects duplicates, groups them, and allows you to “merge” them. Despite the name, this feature keeps the best version of each image and deletes the rest. However, it only works with exact duplicates, meaning it won’t catch photos with slight differences. We’ll cover how to handle these images shortly.
So, what about near-duplicates? For these, you’ll need third-party apps to clean your iPhone. Most of these apps use advanced algorithms to find and group photos taken on the same day but with differences in lighting, subject positioning, or applied effects. Unlike the built-in iOS tool, these apps let you manually choose which images to keep, giving you full control over what stays on your device. This guarantees you only keep the most meaningful or necessary photos while freeing up iPhone storage space.
Another type of photo that takes up a lot of iPhone storage is Live Photos. Unlike standard images, they also contain motion effects and sound, which essentially make them short videos. To free up storage, you can delete Live Photos you no longer need. If you’d like to keep them but save space, you can convert them into still images and remove the original with effects. The best part? You can do this directly in the Photos app without extra tools.
The method above uses two steps: first, you duplicate the photo and then delete the original. However, specialized Live Photo converters can streamline this in one step. They convert the Live Photo to a still image and remove the original automatically. While there aren’t many apps that do this, you can find a few solid options in the App Store.
If your iPhone doesn’t have duplicates and you haven’t used Live Photos, the next step is to clear out the images you no longer need. Instead of scrolling through your entire gallery, start with the automatically created iOS albums. These albums organize your photos by type—selfies, portraits, bursts, screenshots, and more—making it easy to spot and delete what you don’t need. You can find them under the “Media Types” tab in the Photos app.
To wrap up your photo storage cleanup, consider emptying the ‘Recently Deleted’ album. This folder stores deleted photos for 30 days, which allows you to recover any images you might have removed by mistake. If you want to free up storage immediately, you can clear it manually. Otherwise, it will empty itself after 30 days.
In this article, we’ve shown you how to free up storage for photos on your iPhone. While you can also delete downloaded images from the Files app and message attachments, it’s best to start with the Photos app since it typically holds the most images. At first, these methods might seem time-consuming, but they’re actually quite efficient. Built-in iOS tools let you merge all duplicates at once, convert Live Photos to still images in bulk, delete entire albums, and clear everything from the Recently Deleted album in just a few taps.
For the best results and maximum storage savings, we recommend using all the methods we’ve outlined. If manually managing your storage isn’t your thing, upgrading to an iCloud+ plan can automate the process. Ultimately, it’s up to you—but using these strategies will help get more storage and keep it organized.
