iPhone 6: The first 5 incher from Apple Inc

Your iPhone is your companion. But how often do you face the problem of your device memory full and you cannot accommodate more apps and videos? So, here are some simple DIY techniques you can use to free up space on the iPhone:

Delete Useless Apps

This one is the most self-evident, yet it’s almost certainly the one all my friends forget to do when they call me up asking me how come the space on their iPhone is almost gone. If you don’t use apps just delete them. It really is that simple, and even if some are paid-for you can still re-download them via iCloud. Ideally, you only want the apps you actually stored on your iPhone. Everything else is completely expendable.

While many apps are only 10MB to 50MB in size, games can be 500MB to 1GB in size. Also another genre of apps that are often quite large is reference apps, including any that have fancy 3D graphics (like science apps or history apps). So go through every app and game on your iOS device and if you don’t use it, get rid of it. To do so simply tap and hold its icon until it juggles and then tap the X in the corner.

Delete videos and books

I love downloading movies to my iPhone when I have a long train or plane ride, but for 99.9% of the year I have no use for having a full-blown 1080p HD video on my iPhone, right? The problem is I forget to delete these movies or TV shows when I’m done with them and that’s a very BIG problem, considering a two hour HD movie can take up to 3.5GB of space. So go into your Videos app and tap the “Edit” button in the right hand corner. A little X will appear next to every video in the app. Tap it to delete any videos you don’t want.

Do the same for iBooks. Yes, most eBooks take up less than 1MB of space, but only if it’s a normal text eBook; many eBooks nowadays have fancy graphics or even videos embedded in them. Reference books are especially guilty of this. So go into iBooks and tap the “Select” button then tap any book you don’t want any longer and tap the “Delete” button.

And the great thing about deleting videos and books is you can quickly re-download them with just the tap of a button.

Only save HDR photos

Everyone knows that photos take up a lot of room on our devices, so it’s always good to go through and delete older photos in the Photos app. But what many people don’t realize is that a lot of the time any new photo they take is actually being saved as two images, not one, and this means your storage gets taken up twice as fast.

The reasoning behind this is because the iPhone allows you to take HDR images (three images taken at three different exposures and then combined into one image to give you the best look). But when you take an HDR image the original non-HDR image is also saved by default. Hence, two images.

To disable saving the original image (and if you’re just someone who likes taking the best snaps there’s little reason you should save the non-HDR image), go to Settings>Photos & Cameras and toggle the “Keep Normal Photo” switch to off.

Watch out for Newsstand apps

This is one I only chanced upon lately. Newsstand is Apple’s dedicated folder that contains all your digital magazine subscriptions. Some magazines only save the most recent two or three issues, so old issues don’t take up your iPhone’s storage. But there are a few magazines and newspapers I’ve found that save everything forever. One such Newsstand paper is the London Metro paper. It was saving over 6GB worth of old papers on my device. While I could have deleted individual papers, I instead went in and removed the entire app. Go through your Newsstand app and see if any are doing the same on your device.

Set Messages to auto-delete

Your Messages history can take up gigabytes of space, especially if you send or receive a lot of photos via text. In iOS 8 there’s a new setting where you can automatically delete older messages. To enable this go to Settings>Messages and then under “Keep Messages” set it to 30 days or 1 Year. Also be sure that you’ve set Audio and Video messages to expire after two minutes.

You can also delete entire threads individually by opening the Messages app and then swiping left on a thread and tapping Delete. Just be sure you’ve saved any photos you want to permanently hold on to before deleting the thread.

Delete voicemail messages

This last one isn’t a space saver tip that occurs to many people. However, Apple’s Visual Voicemails can quickly take up a lot of space on your iPhone if you never delete any of them. If you’ve only got one or two, it’s no big deal. But I know people who have every voicemail they’ve ever received still on their iPhone. To delete individual Visual Voicemails go to the Phone app then tap on the Voicemail button. Find the voicemail you want to delete and then swipe left on it and tap the red Delete button.