iPhone storage full: what to do
Open Settings → General → iPhone Storage and look at the bar: on most iPhones, Photos is the biggest block, and videos inside it take most of that. Delete or compress large videos, remove duplicate and near-identical photos, empty Recently Deleted, then offload apps you don’t use. Clearing cache rarely frees more than a few hundred megabytes.
Step 1. See what takes the space
Open Settings → General → iPhone Storage. Wait a minute — the colored bar at the top takes a while to calculate. Below it, apps are sorted by size.
On most iPhones the picture looks the same:
- Photos is the biggest block, and videos inside it usually take most of that space. One minute of 4K video at 60 fps is about 400 MB, according to the iPhone’s own camera settings.
- Messages holds every photo, video and voice note you’ve ever received.
- System Data (gray) is caches, logs and temporary files that iOS manages itself — see why it gets so big.
- A few apps — streaming, social, navigation — hold gigabytes of downloads and cache.
Start with whatever is biggest on your bar. The order below fits most iPhones.
Step 2. Deal with videos first
Videos are where the gigabytes are. In Photos, open Collections → Media Types → Videos and look for long clips, screen recordings and anything shot in 4K.
- Delete the ones you don’t need.
- Compress the ones you want to keep. A 4K clip re-encoded at 1080p usually shrinks by more than half with little visible loss. You can do one video at a time with our free video compressor, right in Safari.
- Change future recordings if you don’t need 4K: Settings → Camera → Record Video → 1080p HD at 30 fps.
Step 3. Remove duplicates and near-identical photos
Since iOS 16, Photos finds exact duplicates: Photos → scroll down to Utilities → Duplicates → Merge. That catches photos saved twice, but not the five retakes of the same moment — which is where most of the waste is.
For near-identical shots you can go through bursts and retakes by hand, or use an app that groups similar photos and suggests the best one to keep (that’s what Clear Cleaner does).
Also worth a look: Screenshots (Collections → Media Types → Screenshots). Most of them were needed for a day.
Step 4. Empty Recently Deleted
Everything you delete in Photos stays in Recently Deleted for 30 days and keeps taking space. Photos → Utilities → Recently Deleted → Select → Delete All.
Step 5. Shrink Messages
- Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Messages → Review Large Attachments: delete old videos and photos in one list.
- Settings → Apps → Messages → Keep Messages → 1 Year. Older conversations and their attachments are removed automatically.
Step 6. Offload apps you rarely use
In iPhone Storage, tap an app → Offload App. The app is removed but its documents and data stay, and the icon remains on the Home Screen — tap it to reinstall. There’s also Offload Unused Apps at the top of the list to do this automatically.
For apps with big downloads (Netflix, Spotify, Google Maps offline areas, podcast apps), remove downloads inside the app itself.
What doesn’t help much
- “Clearing cache” with a cleaner app. iOS doesn’t let one app clear another app’s cache, and the system purges caches by itself when space runs low. See how to clear cache on iPhone for what you can do.
- Restarting over and over. A restart can make System Data shrink a bit, but it doesn’t free your photos and videos.
- Converting photos to JPG. HEIC photos are already about half the size of JPG. Converting makes them bigger.
How to do it faster
The manual route works, but it takes an evening for a big library. Clear Cleaner runs the same checks in one scan: similar and duplicate photos with a suggested best shot, screenshots, similar videos and the heaviest clips, plus batch video compression that keeps the original date and albums. It scans on the iPhone, and nothing is deleted until you confirm in the iOS dialog.
