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Photos and videos are the reason most people run out of space, on the phone first, then on the computer, and then in whichever cloud service the phone signed them up for. The problem is rarely that there is too much to store. It is that nobody has decided where things should live, so everything is stored several times and backed up nowhere.
Understand the three places
- The phone takes the photos and keeps recent ones. Its storage is fixed and cannot be upgraded.
- The cloud (iCloud for iPhones, Google Photos or Google One for Android and most people, OneDrive for Microsoft users) holds the full collection and lets the phone keep small copies. This is the part that costs money each month once you pass the free amount.
- The computer and an external drive hold a copy under your own control and are the backup for the rest.
Most storage trouble comes from treating one of these as all three.
The phone: let the cloud hold the originals
An iPhone with iCloud Photos set to Optimize iPhone Storage, or an Android phone with Google Photos backup on and Free up space used occasionally, keeps every photo available and takes up a fraction of the room. The phone shows all your photos; the full-size copies are in the cloud until you open one. This one setting is the answer to almost every "storage full" message on a phone.
Other things that fill a phone: messages with years of attached photos and videos, podcasts and downloaded shows that were never deleted, and apps you no longer use. The phone's storage settings screen lists them in order of size.
The cloud: pay for one, not three
Many households pay for iCloud, Google One and OneDrive at the same time, each holding some of the same photos. Choose one to be the home of the photo collection, based on the phone: iCloud for iPhone households, Google Photos for Android. 200 GB costs a few dollars a month and holds most families' collections; 2 TB covers heavy video and is what a household of several people usually ends up on. Then cancel the others, after checking that nothing lives only in them.
The cloud is not a backup, though. It is a copy that follows the phone. Delete a photo on the phone and it is deleted in the cloud, and after the recently-deleted period it is gone.
The computer: free space and a real copy
A computer that is nearly full slows down and stops updating. Windows has a Storage page under Settings, System, that shows what is using the space and offers cleanup; a Mac has the same under Settings, General, Storage. The usual culprits are the Downloads folder, old installers, and a copy of every photo that was ever imported.
For the copy of the photo collection you control, download the whole library from the cloud service once a year, or set the computer's photo app to keep originals, and back the computer up to an external drive as our simple backup plan describes. That is the copy that survives a lost phone, a closed account or a subscription that lapsed.
Old photos, scans and other people's collections
Boxes of prints, a relative's old computer, a stack of memory cards: get them into the same one collection rather than leaving them scattered. A photo scanner or a scanning service turns prints into files, and importing them into the cloud library with the right dates keeps them in order.
What not to do
- Do not delete photos from the phone to make room while the phone is the only copy. Set up the cloud first, confirm the photos are there, then let the phone free space.
- Do not rely on a single external drive as the only copy of anything. Drives fail without warning.
- Do not let a subscription lapse without downloading the collection first. Services give a grace period and then delete.
Sorting it out
An afternoon is usually enough to choose the one cloud service, set the phones to use it properly, cancel the duplicates, clear the computer and put a backup in place. We do this for families regularly, and the monthly saving from the cancelled subscriptions often pays for it.