Easy, effective ways to cleanup your smartphone’s storage

To begin with, there is one thing you should not do. DO NOT try to install any of the cleanup apps. They will slow down your phone and take up space. Uninstall them if possible. 

First, install Solid Explorer. Search for ‘WhatsApp Video’ and ‘WhatsApp Animated Gifs’, inside these folders. You will find all the videos and animations you exchanged. If you are sure that you have nothing important here, go ahead and delete them. Next, search for ‘WhatsApp Images’. Inside this folder, you will find all your WhatsApp images. 

If you have no important images, you can go ahead and delete all. If you think you may have some important images, then download Siftr Magic Cleaner. This app uses Artificial Intelligence to identify junk photos on your phones so that you can clean them. The app needs data connection. The developers claim that they do 80 per cent of the detection on the phone and very few images are analysed on the server. In my trial, to classify about 1,000 images, the app used 346KB of data. 

The next target is duplicate photos. I do not know why, but I end up with multiple copies of the same image. If you are like me, try Remo Duplicate Photos Remover. This app locates photos on your phone that are duplicates. You can then delete duplicates so that you end up with just one copy of photos. 

Once you have a clean set of photos, install Google Photos. Google provides absolutely free unlimited storage space. The only catch is that the quality of photos is limited to 16 MP. This is more than enough for most of us. Once the app backs up your photos, select ‘Free Up Space’ and delete the photos from your phone. If all this did not help you, you have only two options. Either delete some apps or buy yourself a new phone. When you buy a new phone, please look for a minimum storage of 16GB.