How To Make Space On Icloud Iphone

One of the most irritating popups every iPhone user faces eventually is the dreaded iCloud Storage Full notification. This prevents you from making convenient cloud backups and uploading your photos to the cloud.

Every time it appears, you probably rush to clear out your storage, which photos are a large part of. However, sometimes, your iCloud storage (and/or your iPhone storage) may still show photos taking up a considerable amount of space, even after clearing them out.

There are several ways to tackle this problem; let's run through each of them.

1. Check the Recently Deleted Folder

A common reason for this issue revolves around the Recently Deleted album in the Photos app. This album allows you to recover deleted photos and videos for up to 30 days after deleting them. Like the Recycle Bin on your computer, it acts as a temporary safety net in case you change your mind.

This means that deleted data still exists on your phone—and is synced to iCloud—for some time, despite you having deleted it. People commonly forget to clear this album out, since the folder is buried far down in the Photos app.

Thus, the first step to take if the Photos section of your iCloud storage is still using a lot of space is permanently deleting the pictures in Recently Deleted. Make sure you back up the photos to another location before doing this, in case you want them back in the future.

If the problem isn't fixed after clearing out this folder, the rest of the below tips will lead you to a fix.

2. Restart Your iPhone

Rebooting the system is a conventional fix to numerous bugs and errors. After you've remove a huge chunk of media from your storage, it's important to restart your iPhone. This will hopefully clear out any temporary hiccups causing your available storage to show incorrectly.

3. Modify the Date and Time to Reveal Old Photos

The exact reasoning behind this fix isn't clear, but it often happens that media you deleted in the past returns as hidden files on your device. You won't know they exist, and you can't see them in your Camera Roll either.

This method provides an effective workaround to solve this problem and regain your storage. Here's what to do:

Open Settings and select General.
Select the Date & Time option.
Set Automatically will likely be enabled. If it is, turn the toggle off.
You can then manually change the date and time using the fields below. Select any date and time that's at least a year in the past.
After you're done, open the Photos app and check all your albums, including Recents and Recently Deleted.
Select everything that has reappeared in your albums and delete them from your phone. If you don't see anything, try going back another year or two and check again.

Deleting these "ghost files" that reappear should help free up that extra space on your device and/or iCloud. Make sure to set the time option back to automatic when you're done!

4. Disable iCloud Sync (After Completing a Backup)

iCloud Photos allows you to upload your iPhone's pictures to iCloud automatically. While this is convenient and a good way to protect your photos, it can also lead to your photos taking up too much space in iCloud.

As a temporary adjustment to fix the issue of Photos taking up phantom space, you can thus disable iCloud Photos for a time. This will prevent your photos from syncing and taking up more space, hopefully clearing out the problem.

You should back up your iPhone (locally to a computer if you don't have enough iCloud space) before doing this, to avoid losing any photos in the process. Then, to turn off iCloud Photos:

Open Settings and select your Apple ID profile at the top of the list. Then go to iCloud and choose Photos.
Toggle off the slider next to iCloud Photos. You can also disable the related Upload to My Photo Stream feature if it's available, but this doesn't count against your iCloud storage, so it's not essential.

5. Optimize iPhone Photos for Storage

If photos are taking up too much space on your iPhone's storage all the time, the optimization option is handy. This has your iPhone decrease the resolution of media saved locally in Photos, but retains a full-resolution copy in iCloud.

This helps you save storage while not deleting your original images. To make sure you have photo optimization turned on, follow these steps:

Open Settings > Photos.
Make sure Optimize Phone Storage has a check next to it.

6. Factory Reset Your iPhone

If you've tried all the above steps and your storage is still taken up by photos that don't exist, you should next opt for a full iPhone reset. This is a drastic measure, but will hopefully clear out any persistent issues causing the storage glitch.

As mentioned above, make sure you've backed up your device so you can restore your data after the reset. A factory reset will erase everything on your phone.

To reset your iPhone, follow these steps:

Go to Settings > General.
Scroll down until you find Reset and tap it.
From your list of options, tap on Erase All Content and Settings.
Confirm your choice, then your iPhone will return to factory defaults.

After the reset, use your phone for a while and see if photo storage usage returns to normal.

When all else fails, you need to talk with Apple. If the problem persists even after a factory reset, you have a serious problem and should get professional support from Apple.

You can either do this online through Apple Support, or visit your nearest Apple Store to talk with experts there. Having a valid warranty is likely to help your case in case of a major issue.

How to Better Manage Storage in the Future

While this error was hopefully a one-time problem for you, there's a chance it could happen in the future. It's better to maintain your storage ahead of time to reduce the impact of such an issue, so you should consider ways to avoid filling up your storage.

Some methods you can employ to manage both your iCloud and local storage on a long-term basis include:

Deleted unused apps at regular intervals
Upgrade your iCloud storage plan to get more space
Delete old messages and unimportant conversations
Clear Recently Deleted in Photos regularly
Offload apps taking up a great amount of storage
Disable iCloud Photos if you don't use it—consider backing up photos with another service

Your iPhone Storage Can Breathe Now

This iPhone and iCloud storage error, experienced by many in iOS 14, is definitely a pain. Fortunately, there are some ways around it. Hopefully, the methods presented here let you get your photo storage usage back down to normal.

And by keeping your storage clear ahead of time, you can reduce the impact of this issue if it happens again.

How to Manage the Storage on Your iPhone

Need a few tips on how to manage storage on your iPhone? We'll show you how to access and clean up photos, contacts, and more.