If you’ve ever received the dreaded “not enough available storage” message on your iPhone or iPad, you know the unsettling question that follows; what am I going to have to delete to proceed? This article is intended to make you aware of some steps you can take to free up space. Whether you decide to implement any of these steps is entirely up to you, and not the responsibility of AppChasers. Basically that means if you delete something you didn’t want to, don’t blame us! So with that out of the way, let’s move on.

Apple has made freeing up space relatively easy over the years. In order to see how much storage space you have, in the Settings app you can go to General -> Usage. Here you will see your apps listed in order by size greatest to least. You can then click on an app to delete it. You’ll also be able to delete your entire music collection here. Depending on the size of your music library, that can free up a lot of space. Deleting photos and videos however, will require you to go into the Photos app and manually delete the ones you don’t want anymore.

The ways mentioned above will help you quickly free up space when you need it. But that space will eventually get swallowed up again if you don’t change your general workflow. Below we will discuss ways that you can use the cloud (meaning internet servers) to backup or even store your photos and music online and not on your iPhone or iPad.

---

Music

iTunes Radio

iTunes Radio is Apple’s new music streaming service that will give you access to to millions of songs for free. It’s built right into the Music app that you already have on your iPhone or iPad. You can create stations based on your tastes. You will have to listen to ads interspersed throughout the music and the amount of songs you can skip is limited. But hey its free music and won’t take up any space on your device. [Grab it here]

Spotify

Spotify is very similar to iTunes Radio in that it will stream music to you from their servers. The difference is that they offer a premium service for $9.99/month and you can choose specific songs, albums, and artists to listen to at will. Spotify also lets you curate your own playlists. You can even download music to your iPhone or iPad for when you don’t have any internet connection. Another contender in this arena is Rdio. So you might want to check them out as well.

Google Play Music

Google offers their own competitor in the music streaming market. Free of charge Google allows you to upload up to 20,000 of your own songs that are stored on your desktop or laptop. They will then store that music on their servers from which you can stream on your device. They also offer an All Access monthly paid subscription to all the music on Google Play for $9.99. [Grab the music uploader here]

 

iTunes Match

Similar to Google Play Music, but with a significantly different price model, is Apple’s iTunes Match service. With the click of a button in iTunes on your desktop or laptop, Apple will scan your iTunes music library and match songs to their online library. Any unmatched songs will be uploaded from your computer. Then you can stream your songs right from the iPhone or iPad Music app without having to store them on your device. No matter where you originally bought your music, it will now allow you access to iTunes’ official version for download or streaming. That’s right you can download your music right to your music app for offline use. So you really never need to connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer again. For $24.99/year this service is my favorite. As a bonus, that fee also removes ads and skip limits from iTunes Radio. [Grab it here]

---

Photos

Carousel by Dropbox

Dropbox got the online storage ball rolling back in 2008. Recently though, the cloud wars have shifted to photos. As in, which service provides the best way to backup and grant access to all your photos quickly and easily. The Dropbox app has offered automatic uploading of your iPhone photos and videos for some time now. But there was never a good way to browse them until Dropbox released Carousel. If you have a Dropbox account, Carousel will upload all your photos and videos in the background without you having to worry about it. It will even offer to delete these photos from your device once they’re safely backed up. This will help free up a lot of your precious local storage. Once uploaded, Carousel displays your photos in a beautiful arrangement. You can scrub through your timeline to find a particular memory. Or rely on the Flashback feature to pick a memory for you. If you’re a heavy Dropbox user and have enough storage in your plan, I think you’ll love Carousel.

CameraSync and Flickr

The cool thing about Flickr (a Yahoo service) is they give you 1 terabyte of storage for free (thats 1000 gigabytes)! The Flickr app has been updated to allow automatic uploading of your photos from your iPhone and iPad right to your online account. However, currently it will not automatically upload videos. If you want to automatically upload videos keep reading.

In order to automatically upload your photos and videos like the Dropbox app does you need to use separate app. That app is CameraSync. CameraSync actually works with numerous storage services, but Flickr give you the most space for free.

Launching CameraSync for the first time will ask you what service you want to connect to. Choose Flickr and login to your account. Next CameraSync will ask which photos you want to upload (all existing, only new photos, or photos from date forward). Choose your preference and then set the privacy level. This is important because you won’t want your entire iPhone photo set being visible to the world. The viewing default is “Only Me”. After your Flickr account is set up, go into the CameraSync settings on the main screen. Here you can specify overall settings like “upload videos” and “Only sync on wifi”. You can also set automatic uploading at a specific location. This is a cool way to automatically upload your camera roll when you arrive home after a day of traveling. Play around with the settings to your liking.

Camera sync is a powerful way to clean up your iPhone and do it using free services.

Picturelife

Picturelife offers an automatic way to backup all the pictures you take on your iPhone and iPad. There are other services that offer the same, but Picturelife’s suite of browsing, editing, and discovering features are unmatched in our opinion. See our full review here.

---

Movies

Air Video HD

Air Video HD lets you store all your movies on your home computer and watch them remotely on your iPhone or iPad. That way you don’t need to load every movie on your mobile device. Just throw them in your Air Video HD connected folder and they’ll all be streamed wherever you are. Check out our video review here.

---

iCloud Backup

Once you have implemented the options listed above, your iCloud backup sizes can by minimized. You’ll find this helpful if you ever get the dreaded “Not Enough Storage” message preventing you from backing up with Apple’s 5GB of free iCloud storage. Most of the time this is a result of iCloud wanting to backup your camera roll. But, if you’re backing up your camera roll using other apps, like Dropbox or Picturelife, you don’t need iCloud to do this. So you can turn this option off. The video below shows how to resume your iCloud backups by deselecting the camera roll.

We’ve also made the following video series on how to free up space in your iCloud storage. These videos also cover iCloud Drive and iCloud Photo Library.

---

If you see your iPhone filling up with space everyday, the above suggestions might be a good way to manage your storage better and have peace of mind.