Phone Spring Cleaning
by Karl Plesz
At some point, many phone users arrive at a very annoying, yet important milestone: running out of storage space on their phone. The reason we tend to fill up our phone storage so quickly is because of how easy it is to accumulate data. Apps are easy to get, and in many cases, are free or very inexpensive. Having a camera built into your phone means being able to take pictures of anything, at any time. As phone cameras get better, the pictures generate bigger files. Video clips take this storage requirement to a whole new level. At some point, if you’re a vigorous user, you may run short on space. Is there a solution? Time for some spring cleaning.
Start with the apps. Be stingy and ask the following question about every app on your phone. “Have I used this in the last six months?” If the answer is no, and you know in your heart that you probably won’t use it in the next six months either, uninstall it. You can always get that app back if you change your mind. But don’t stop with just the apps themselves. Some apps, especially those used to communicate, tend to keep a growing pile of past texts, messages, calls, etc. Find out how the apps store their stuff and delete it too. Don’t assume that a deleted app will also delete its saved files. Sometimes an app will leave your past history intact, in case you reinstall.
Move on to videos and photos. Look at every video you’ve stored with the eye of a ruthless movie critic. Will you really care about that video clip next year? Yes? Then upload it to YouTube or Facebook or a cloud storage service like Google Photos and delete it from your phone. If your kids roll their eyes every time you show a certain clip, you may be kidding yourself about just how amazing it is. Delete it. Move on to photos. That picture of those amazing desserts you had looked good when you took them. Do you think you’re the only person who has ever had the Ultimate Red Velvet Cake Cheesecake at Cheesecake Factory? I’m willing to bet that there are pics of that exact dessert on Google that are much more professional. Even if you insist on keeping the dessert photos, you don’t need ten different angles of cheesecake. Delete nine, keep the best one. Photographic memories are great keepsakes, just don’t be like a museum about them. One final note about pictures. Did your sister really, really love that one picture of the two of you at Disneyland? Great. Send it to her and let her keep it.
Music is another thing that can gobble up storage on a phone. It’s nice to be able to store every song you own, but I know folks with music collections topping 100GB or more. If you want to avoid using up a lot of space on your phone, consider paying for a music streaming service like Spotify and let them store all your favourite songs in the Cloud. Yes, that means streaming data costs, but sometimes you have to choose what’s more important – a phone with a lot of storage (expensive), that may still not be enough down the road, or a better data plan (or more use of free Wi-Fi). In my case, I let my music streaming service store music on my phone so I can save on data costs, but because of the app’s compression, they use much less storage capacity.
If you drill into your phone’s settings, you can find out what’s using up all that space and get to weeding things out. So, if you’re getting low on phone storage, or even if you’re not, consider doing some spring cleaning. Be ruthless. And leverage the Cloud as much as you dare.
