How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone to Be Ready for iOS 18

Apple is rolling out iOS 18 today with exciting new features for the Photos app, improved privacy protections, and home screen customizations. However, installing the brand new version of iOS requires a fair amount of free space, since you have to download it to your iPhone and then install it. Before trying to update, I recommend making sure you have at least 10GB of free space. That’s more than enough to download the update and give you some room before you hit your storage limit.

Read more: iOS 18 and Apple AI: What You Need to Know

If you don’t have 10GB of free space, there are some simple steps you can take to free up space. For example, moving your photos and videos to the cloud can make a huge difference, but don’t rush into backing up to iCloud. Google Photos might be a better option for you, and I’ll explain why below. I’ll also give you some quick steps to find large files you no longer need (and probably didn’t even realize you had) in your old emails and text messages. Read on for the details.

Delete (or move) photos and videos

If you don’t have the time or patience to search through old photos and videos, or if you want to keep all your media files, back them up to a cloud storage service and delete the ones you don’t want locally on your phone. With cloud storage services, you can choose to automatically back up your photos when you have access to Wi-Fi, so you have a full-resolution copy.

The easiest way to back up your photos and videos is to use iCloud Photos. To save space, Apple lets you store low-resolution versions of photos on your phone, and full-resolution versions in iCloud. There’s one major drawback, though: if you delete a photo from your iPhone, you also delete it from iCloud Photos. This is a dealbreaker for me. I don’t want to risk accidentally deleting a photo I might want later. I’d rather have a full backup. But if you don’t mind the limitations of iCloud Photos, here’s how to enable automatic iCloud backup:

1. Open Settings and select “Apple ID.”
2. Select “iCloud,” then “Photos,” and switch to “iCloud Photos.” Then select “Optimize iPhone Storage” to keep a lower-resolution version of your photos on your phone and the full resolution in iCloud.
3. Select “iCloud Backup,” then toggle “iCloud Backup.”

If you don’t want to use iCloud to back up your photos, I recommend Google Photos, which can be set up to automatically back up your photos and videos over Wi-Fi. Once you install the app, you’ll be asked to set up a backup of your photos. Google Photos has a “Free Up Space” feature that deletes photos that have already been backed up to the cloud. However, you’ll need to delete them again from Apple Photos to save space. To do this, go to the Photos app, select “Recently Deleted,” and delete the photos again.

Delete files sent in Messages and Email

While it’s nice to see photos and videos in a messaging app, there’s often no need to keep them. The same goes for attachments to old emails. It’s easy to find and delete these old files.

On iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Messages. In the “Photos,” “Videos,” “GIFs & Stickers,” and “Other” folders, you can delete attachments you’ve sent or received. For other files, go to the Files app and select “On My iPhone.” In the On My iPhone folder, you’ll find folders for all the apps that save files in the Files app. Look through the files in the folders for any large files. You’ll see the size of each file below the file name. Delete any files you don’t need by pressing and holding the file name until a menu appears, then select “Delete.”

Read more: How to Recover Deleted iMessages

Uninstall apps you don’t use

Photos and videos are the usual memory guzzlers, but apps (especially games) can also use up a lot of space. Delete apps you don’t use.

On your iPhone, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. You’ll see a list of apps sorted by how much space they’re using. Once you’ve selected an app, you’ll have the option to delete or offload it. Offloading an app will remove it, but it will leave your data in case you want to reload the app in the future. You can also choose to automatically offload apps that you haven’t used in a while. Go to Settings > App Store and turn on “Offload Unused Apps.”

(Image credit: Screenshot via Techlicious , iPhone mockup via Canva

For the past 20+ years, Techlicious founder Suzanne Kantra has been researching and writing about the world’s most exciting and important science and technology issues. Before Techlicious, Suzanne was the technology editor at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and the senior technology editor at Popular Science. Suzanne has been featured on CNN, CBS, and NBC.