Are you tired of being out of storage space on your iphone? Most often it’s your photos and videos that are using up all of your precious iPhone storage free space. Even if you pay for iCloud storage your pictures and videos will still take up a significant amount of free space. Google Photos can help you free up space on your iPhone while keeping your memories safely stored in the cloud.
This process is very simple but does require a couple of steps and you will need to remember that you may need to work around a few issues introduced by this change. I’ll cover these in detail below. For now, let’s get started creating free space on your iPhone.
Installing Google Photos on iPhone
First, you will need to install the Google Photos app on your iPhone and create/sign in to your google account. If you don’t already have an account you can create one for free in the app or by clicking here. Next you will need to enable backup and sync to allow the app to store your photos and videos in your google account. You should be aware that you will need to periodically open the Google Photos app on your iPhone to trigger the sync process. You may be able to make this more automatic with background app refresh settings but I normally disable this. Let me know in the comments about your experience with this.
Backing Up Your Photos
Once the photos are synced you can utilize the “free up space” option in the menu to remove the photos and videos from your default photos app and completely remove them from your iPhone and iCloud. The Google Photos app with automatically detect the photos and videos that are already synced and prompt you to delete them. The app will them instruct you to remove the photos from the recently deleted album to finish the process. Once you complete this you will have more free space on your iPhone and iCloud.
Freeing Up Space On Your iPhone
You may be thinking well, didn’t I just move the data to another app that will take up an equal amount of free space on your iPhone. The difference is that the Google Photos app will not keep full copies of the photos and videos on your iPhone. It will display a small thumbnail in the gallery and will download the full file on demand when you view it. This does mean that you will have to depend on your internet connection and should be a consideration when you are on cellular instead of wifi.
There are definitely some convenience and simplicity tradeoffs to consider in this solution but overall I think this is well implemented and provides great return for investment as google drive storage is cheap than iCloud and maybe even free depending on how much storage you need. I hope that you find this helpful and it allows you to free up space on your iPhone. Please leave a comment below and let me know if you have used this feature or if you have other ways of handling photo storage and backup on your iPhone.