How I installed 40 GB on iPhone and installed 120 gigs in iCloud without losing anything useful

It broke a week ago, now I write with one hand. There are fewer probabilities, so I spend more time with an iPhone in my palm. You can’t really work on a computer.

Special attention to the smartphone will bring unexpected results: over the weekend, I cleaned not only its memory, but also collected photos in iCloud. It didn’t remove anything needed.

The secret is simple: I erased duplicate photos, unnecessary “heavy” videos and tons of useless screenshots. Now I plan to repeat the same on the iPhones of my wife and son. I feel that there is potentially another 300 gigabytes of free space in iCloud.

The method of technical simplicity and delivery is free. iOS will even help a little.

1. Remove Duplicates in iOS Photos Tool

In iOS 16 built-in app Photo learned to find and filter out duplicate photos and videos in the media library. They are now displayed in a separate menu, where you can delete all “repetitions” with two taps.

open Photothen tab Albums. Scroll down the list and click on the item duplicates. If not, then you don’t have duplicates.

Here you can choose which of the duplicates to keep and which to delete. Personally, I don’t see the point in this – I erase everything at once: I press Choosethen Choose allthen I tap on the trash can icon and restore the deletion. It is reliable, original in memory.

This method is only complete, namely “one to one” duplicate photos and videos. You won’t recover many gigabytes with it (2 gigabytes – for me), but it will do as an initial stage.

2. Remove screenshots (screen shots)

In the same application Photo tab Albums there is a section Screenshots. These are your screenshots.

Before the big purge, I had 26,000 screenshots. This has been building up since 2014. No comments. The necessary of them – well, if 10 percent.

Here it is necessary to wield manually. It’s painfully long and boring. To put it bluntly, I just count everything that was “screened” before 2021 and erased it. Deleting 24 thousand screenshots 20 gigabytes in icloud. I’m sure I’ll never regret it. I also advise you to leave Screen recordings in the observation section.

3. Delete the video

Modern iPhones record videos in 4K and 60 frames per second. A video file in this quality for 8-10 minutes can easily weigh 2 or more gigabytes. If you have been using iPhones for a long time and actively filming “vidos”, you will have about a thousand of such videos, if not more.

The video will have to be shot manually. I rubbed 300 pieces of rollers, in the collection it restored me more 40 gigabytes in icloud.

4. Remove Series

20 serial cases of one moment are 20 rare photographs. Why do you need them? Delete Series in Photo or world best shot of them.

5. Delete RAW images

Not sure if you have them. But if you’re using ProRAW on your next iPhone, remember that each such file weighs 25 megabytes or more. 1000 photos in ProRAW format is 25 gigabytes.

So open this section in Photo and clean it up mercilessly. I restored here 15 gigabytes.

6. Install the “deleter” of similar episodes from the App Store

In addition to all of the above, everyone in the media library has complete photos that are very similar to each other, but slightly different. For example, when multiple selfies are applied. They will not be automatically considered duplicates by the built-in iOS tools. Here you need to go deeper: either use fiber manually, or helper programs.

There are several apps in the App Store that use the built-in neural network in iOS to recognize similar pictures. Unfortunately, none of them are free. I prefer Duplicatus – its developer once shared his favorite programs on iPhones.ru. The program does everything without the Internet, it does not send pictures anywhere, which is especially commendable. It costs from 399 rubles a month, but you can try to look for similar pictures in it for free.

I have collected such similar photos under 70 gigabytes! I deleted 44 GBThe rest has not yet sorted, but it’s a matter of time.

As a result, minus 40 GB on the iPhone, minus 120 GB on iCloud

When you finish the disease, you should not go into Photochapter Recently deleted – and erase everything from there.

I did not regret that I did all this, and I advise you. Why store tens of thousands of episodes in iCloud if you don’t actually need more than half of them? There must be order everywhere.

Unless, of course, this is a time-consuming business. Worth doing this when you’re bored. On weekends, for example, Parts. Instead of tiktok and youtube. There will definitely be more benefits.