By

JOANNA STERN

Updated March 20, 2017 12:47 p.m. ET

22 COMMENTS

It’s 2017 and I still often witness this soul-crushing scene: A friend goes to take a photo only to realize he doesn’t have any more space on his iPhone (soul crush 1). Then he frantically deletes apps or photos (soul crush 2). Finally, he can take a picture…of his latte (soul crush 3).

Deleting a fairly small photo or app here or there is never the answer. To find out what is eating most of your space head to Settings > General > Storage + iCloud Storage > then Manage Storage.

For most, the biggest stuff is in four types of places: photos, messages, music and the big third-party apps that everyone has. These tricks can help you take back your precious gigabytes.

Photos and videos are very likely your greatest storage hogs. The obvious solution is to clear out space by uploading them to a cloud service, like Google Photos or Apple Photos, then deleting them off the phone.

Apple Photos has an “Optimized iPhone Storage” setting located in your iPhone settings that will remove originals from the phone once uploaded to iCloud. Similarly, in the Google Photos app you can select “Free Up Space” to delete photos already backed up from the phone.

But if you are looking for a faster, non-Cloud method, I suggest SanDisk’s iXpand USB drive. (It’s available in different storage sizes. The 64GB model costs $60.) Plug the drive into your iPhone, download the SanDisk app and then you can move the photos onto it. (It took me 4 minutes to transfer 400 photos to the drive.) Then plug the drive into a computer and you can save them locally or upload them to your preferred cloud service.

Messages

You’ll be blown away by how much space your old texts and iMessages take up. (I had a whopping 8GB of them.) Before you delete those chains or the photos in them, save the ones you’d like to keep using with iMazing. Download the $40 program to a Windows PC or Mac, plug your phone into the computer and the iMazing program will recognize the messages and allow you to save them. (You can also use iTunes for this but, ugh, iTunes.)

Once saved, you can start manually deleting messages on your phone. Or you can go into Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and then delete messages that are a year or 30 days old.

Music

Apple Music lets you store music locally, but sometimes that cache gets overwhelming. You can delete songs in bulk from your phone—without removing them from your music library—by going to Settings > General> Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage then tapping Music. Delete by artist, album or song by tapping in and swiping left, or you can just delete all stored songs. Don’t worry, you can download them again as you need them. (If you use Spotify on an iPhone, go to downloaded playlists and turn off “Downloaded.”)

Third-Party Apps Files

Some of the most popular apps—like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat—cache or save photos and other media to your phone. Twitter recently added a cache-cleaning feature. (Unfortunately Facebook and Snapchat don’t have the same.) In the Twitter iOS app, go to the Me tab > Settings > Data Usage > Media Storage and clear it. I had nearly 1GB of media to clear out.

Do a Google search for the apps you use to see if they have a similar feature. For other apps, like Facebook or Snapchat, the best way to clear this is to delete the app and reinstall it.

In her weekly “You Got This” video series, Joanna offers quick mobile tips meant to be watched right on your phone. Watch more of her “You Got This” videos here.

Write to Joanna Stern at joanna.stern@wsj.com