Smartphone storage is at a real premium unless you’re lucky enough to own one with lots of it. (And if you do, your phone likely wasn’t cheap.)
With all the apps and music you download, and photos and videos you capture, there’s probably a good chance your smartphone is bumping up against its storage limit. Those with 16GB smartphones or (gasp) 8GB smartphones have it the worst. It’s especially tough if you’re a 16GB iPhone user since iPhones don’t have memory card slots for storage expansion.
Kind of like cleaning your room, clearing out the clutter in your phone is a must if you want to make room for new stuff. It may feel like a daunting task, but a lot of it actually doesn’t take that long. Here are the best ways to clear out space on your Android or iPhone.
Your photos app is a treasure trove of memories. I know all about it (I own a 128GB iPhone 6 and 53.9GB of that is hogged up by photos and videos).
It’s not a fun job and it’ll take a while if — like me — you have a lot of photos and videos to look through, but clearing out the old ones will make room for new ones. Start at the beginning and comb for duplicates — delete the blurry pics, old screenshots, and select that one good pic from the group of burst-shot photos.
When you’re done sifting through the pics, go ahead and delete any old videos and movies. If your phone supports it (like on iPhone), go ahead and trim video clips that are too long and shorten them where possible.
People who aren’t the type to look back at old photos and videos have it easier.
For y’all out there, you can simply back up your photos to the cloud through services like Flickr, Dropbox and Microsoft One Drive. (We highly recommend using Google Photos, which lets you store an unlimited amount of photos at up to 16 megapixels each and videos up to 1080p resolution) — for free.
Image: Google
Transferring photos and video to a computer is also easy to do.
Using Image Capture to transfer photos from iPhone to Mac.
Image: Screenshot: Mashable
Mac users can plug their iPhone in via USB and use iTunes, iPhoto or the new Photos app to manage their media. Mac users can also use the included Image Capture app to move photos and videos from their iPhone. After backing up locally, just delete them off your iPhone — all of them, no need to be selective. Apple’s support website provides step-by-step instructions here.
Windows users can also use iTunes to back up their photos and videos. Transferring files manually, though, varies — instructions for how to do so on Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7 can be found here.
Alternatively, if you own an iPhone 5 (or later) running iOS 7 (or later), you can use AirDrop to wirelessly transfer files to a Mac running OS X Yosemite (or later). Instructions on how to use AirDrop can be found on Apple’s support website here.
This one is a no-brainer. Apps can take up a significant amount of your phone storage. Purge any apps you haven’t used recently or don’t use very often, especially old games you no longer play.
In case you missed the memo, to delete an app on iPhone, long press on an icon and then tap the X over it.
To delete apps on Android, go into the app drawer and long press on an app, and then drag it to the “uninstall” message that shows up. Simply long-pressing on an app on the home screen and then dragging it to the “remove” only removes it from the homescreen and not entirely from the phone.
Students and teachers can get a free pair of Beats Solo 2 headphones with the purchase of a new Mac.
Image: Mashable Elizabeth Pierson
Music is another huge storage hog. Over the last few years, streaming music and music subscription services have all but replaced downloading music and storing it locally.
Depending on the size of your music collection, you could reclaim gigabytes and gigabytes of storage by switching to streaming music like Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and SoundCloud.
The only downsides to moving to a music streaming service is you may not have offline access and, you know, paying a monthly fee for the music. Apple Music offers offline tracks, but it defeats the point of trying to clear your storage. Spotify’s premium membership also lets you save songs for offline listening, but again, it goes against the objective here.
The Qualcomm 820-powered camera can perform better in low light, capturing 4K video at 30fps with effectively high dynamic range (HDR).
Image: Jhila Farzaneh/Mashable
Practically every flagship Android phone and the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are capable of recording videos in 4K resolution. These video files are generally way larger than HD and full HD videos.
Unless you have a 4K TV or 4K computer monitor to play the videos on, chances are you don’t need to record in 4K at all. Turning 4K video recording off will save battery life, too.
By default, most smartphones don’t shoot in 4K, but if you fiddled with the setting before or aren’t sure if it’s on or not, you can dig into your camera settings to switch it off.
Image: Raymond Wong/Mashable
Memory card slots are great for expanding the internal storage, but they’re also great for offloading files.
Some phones include a file manager for moving files from the internal storage to the microSD card and vice versa. If your Android phone doesn’t have a file manager, we recommend downloading ES File Manager (free) or File Manger (free).
iPhones users are out of luck here since they don’t have microSD card slots.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
There have been plenty of photo apps for iPhone, but Google Photos outclasses them all by offering unlimited storage for every picture and video you capture. Yes, there are restrictions on size, but they’re generous, and the app is perfectly suited for cloud photo storage since it isn’t weighed down by kitchen-sink cloud services (Dropbox, Box, OneDrive) or an extraneous social network (Flickr, the old Google+ app). But the real magic is in the application of Google’s search tech, organizing your pics by face, event and even object. Best of all: Google shames the iPhone’s native Photos app with better scrolling and selection tools. Now that’s thinking different.
As our iPhones got better at taking photos and our apps got better at sharing them, we needed better apps to show them off — what better way to do that than with a collage? With a couple of dozen layout options and custom borders, filters and other effects, Pic Stitch has long been one of the most popular collage makers. The app is a little less relevant now that Instagram and many others have added the ability to build collages, but it’s unlikely we’d have those apps today if not for Pic Stitch paving the way.
Launched as VSCO Cam in 2012, VSCO quickly set itself apart with its carefully crafted “presets” and editing controls that were meant to make iPhone photos look like they were shot on film. While the concept wasn’t new, VSCO, which got its start creating presets for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, was highly praised by professional photographers and amateurs alike for its ability to add a richness and depth to photos. Though the app’s design is beautifully minimalist, the controls aren’t the most intuitive, especially for casual users. But with more than 70 million #VSCO tags on Instagram, it remains one of the most influential photo apps to ever grace the iPhone.
Instagram’s second app, Hyperlapse, is a dead-simple time-lapse creator. Its lasting appeal isn’t the fact it can speed up and slow down recorded video footage anywhere from 1x to 12x normal speed, but its spectacular use of software image-stabilization. Normally, to get silky-smooth stabilized video, you’d need a gimbal, a steadicam or some other kind of hardware stabilizer, but with Hyperlapse it’s all algorithm-based, using data from the iPhone’s gyroscope to measure and remove frames that are shaky. The result? Cinematic-like video that’s smooth and often looks like it’s been captured with more expensive gear.
Apple’s default iPhone apps are designed to get the job done, but if you want more features, a third-party app almost always does something better. Take Camera+ ($2.99), an app from Tap Tap Tap that now has over 14 million users and was ahead of its time with advanced settings people wanted but the native camera didn’t offer. In 2010, the app briefly got banned from the App Store because it let users change the iPhone’s volume button into a physical camera shutter. Apple later copied that exact feature in the default Camera app in iOS 5. Camera+ was also one of the first camera apps to have grid lines, something else Apple copied. We’re sensing a pattern.
Many people believe there would be no Instagram without Hipstamatic’s classic old-timey camera filters, but the reality is that they occupied the same space in history. Hipstamatic was the pay-to-play Apple app of the year, while Instagram was the free upstart that was bought by Facebook and never had to worry about making money. Today, Instagram is bigger than ever and using in-line ads to generate revenue, while Hipstamatic has had a more peripatetic existence, switching to in-app purchases, and, at one point, laying off all but six employees.
Even so, in the early 2010s, Hipstamatic was the photo app to use if you wanted cool filters (for more photographic control, you used Camera+) and ended up influencing a whole generation of camera and photo apps.
You’d be hard-pressed to find another iPhone app that’s anywhere near as influential as Instagram. Sure, other players were experimenting with photo sharing and filters prior to the app’s launch in 2010, but it was Instagram that perfected the format.
Moreover, the app’s dominance is closely linked to the iPhone’s popularity in a way few apps can claim. Instagram, which was exclusively on the iPhone for its first two years, was one of those “magic” apps that helped make the iPhone so coveted. (When half your Twitter timeline was filled with Instagram shots, the FOMO was real.)
The app was simple, and its filtered creations were easily shareable, which helped Instagram go viral almost immediately. Like many apps, Instagram owes some of its original virality to Twitter, which helped the app take off seemingly overnight.
It grew so fast, in fact, that early users frequently experienced outages as the company’s two cofounders — its only employees in the early days — struggled to keep the app from crashing as hundreds of thousands of new users flocked to the service. Even as Instagram grew, it never got too cluttered with unnecessary features and updates.
When Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, it was generating exactly $0 in revenue. Though some initially questioned the move, Instagram, which now counts more than 400 million users, has only grown its popularity, and influence and has also introduced sponsored content.
Its design isn’t perfect, to be sure (there’s no way to zoom, for instance), but the app changed how we think about sharing experiences, and it’s become one of the most influential social networks in the world. Read more…