How to Free Up iCloud Storage Space

The storage on your iCloud account can soon fill up even if you've only recently purchased one of the greatest iPhones. Apple's complimentary 5GB of storage, or even one of the larger sizes available for a monthly charge, will quickly be full of photos, videos, and other things.

Deleting useless items is the first step to clearing your iCloud space, even if you can buy more storage or utilize one of the best cloud storage options. This piece will cover a few simple techniques to free up space on your iCloud account.

1. Find Out What's Taking Up Space

Make sure you know what kinds of files are consuming up the most space before you begin the process of deleting them from iCloud! Navigate to iCloud in the settings app and click Manage Storage.

In a bar chart at the very top of the screen, you can see the various file formats that have taken up all of your iCloud storage space. Backups, photographs, and communications can take up half or more of the storage space for most Apple customers. See how much storage each program takes up by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

You now have a decent notion of what iCloud storage modifications are most effective at freeing up space.

An overflowing iCloud storage account is usually the result of device backups. Your old iPhone may have been configured to automatically upload backups to the cloud, and I don't remember you deleting those files.

They're still taking up valuable storage space years later when there's no chance you'll ever need to retrieve that backup.

From the App settings (iOS) or System Preferences app (Windows), you can delete these files (macOS). Then select Manage Backups from the drop-down menu to get a list of all the backups presently stored in your iCloud account. Remove the ones you no longer use and immediately free up storage space.

Consider checking out the iCloud backup status of each app while you're here. You may want to copy some of these to the cloud, such as your Photos app, which is essential.

However, you don't need to save data from every app on your phone. You can turn off an app's backups by simply tapping the status bar.

2. Get Rid Of The Old Messages

Messages sent via SMS or iChat, for example, maybe as small as a few kilobytes. In contrast, if you've been using an iPhone for a long time, you may have more than GB of texts in your iCloud account. Sending a lot of emoticons or photographs could make the complete texts even more impressive.

Go to the Messages app on your phone to free up some space. Messages can be deleted individually or in bulk from this app section. If you delete a message on one Apple device, it will also be deleted from all of your other Apple devices.

Instead of deleting all your files, you can select only to delete attachments, which take up a significant amount of storage space. Tap the contact's name, then the information button. When you're done selecting the photos you want to delete, click the Delete All button.

3. Delete Email Attachments

Sending large attachments via email is a common practice, and it can quickly fill up your iCloud storage space, especially when you have several years' worth of emails.

The good news is that you don't have to delete all your emails from your email storage. iCloud Mail's attachment size sorting feature makes it easy to see emails with large attachments.

Select View, then Sort by Attachments in iCloud Mail. All emails with attachments can now be deleted in a matter of seconds. Reduce the number of emails you eliminate by specifying a lower attachment size limit, such as 15 megabytes (MB).

4. Manage Your Photo Library

There is a significant likelihood that your photo collection is consuming most of the space in your iCloud storage account.

Moreover, the cameras on Apple devices are extremely high-resolution, and more and more people are taking video clips and images. If you don't keep an eye on your media library, it's simple to accumulate hundreds of terabytes of data.

This means you can't just go through your iCloud photo library and look for terrible photos. It's up to you to go through your photo albums and remove the ones you don't want to see anymore. It's a good idea to look through your cloud-stored films and trim out the segments you don't want to lose.

Your iCloud storage space isn't changed immediately as you delete images. Since photographs and videos are put to the Recently Deleted album when they are trashed instead of permanently deleted, this is why. Remove all files from the Recently Deleted album to free up space in your cloud account.

You can do a few things in the future to protect your photo storage from bursting at the seams. It's a good practice to delete images as quickly as possible after taking them.

A five-tap selfie is a fantastic opportunity to remove the other four images that didn't turn out as you had hoped. You can do the same thing with videos by trimming them down to only the sections you want to keep and deleting the rest.

If you don't need to access older albums across devices on-demand, you can also migrate them to an external storage service.

In the long run, you can save money on your subscription to cloud storage by moving files to an external hard drive and freeing up iCloud storage space.