One of the drawbacks of mobile phones that many people have to live with on a day-to-day basis has to do with storage. No matter how many gigabytes of storage we have available as soon as we buy the phone, after a few months we can fill all the space with applications, files, but above all with photos and videos. Google knows about the problem and for this reason it has integrated a special option that will avoid us headaches.
Gone are the options to get extra storage that we used years ago, we refer above all to memory cards. In the middle of the year 2023, practically no mobile includes this possibility, since it seeks to offer better protection against water and dust, something very complex if we want to keep the SD card slot. Another reason why it has been removed is the need for more space inside and, of course, that the cards slow down the phones.
Delete the photos and videos you already have in the cloud
It may seem like a bad idea to delete all the files on our mobile phone to recover memory , but the truth is that we don’t have to fear anything, if we know how to do it correctly, all those memories will be safe in the cloud. On both Android and iPhone phones we have the popular Google Photos application available, with which we can generate an exact or compressed copy of our photos and videos.
If you haven’t tried it yet, we invite you to download it and put it to the test from the following buttons that will take you directly to the Google Play store or the Apple App Store:
Previously we had the advantage of being able to store unlimited content, but for a few years now we have had to count on enjoying 15 GB of cloud storage without going through the checkout. In the event that we do not have many photos and videos, this will be enough to do a great cleaning on the phone , although if we have more, we will have to buy more storage or resort to another trick that we are going to tell you about in the next section.
To start the secret option of Google that cleans the memory of the mobile we only have to follow these steps:
- We enter the Google Photos app.
- We touch on our profile photo at the top.
- Click on the ‘Free up space’ button.
- We confirm that we want to Free memory.
All the GB that appear on the screen will therefore be deleted from our smartphone and will only be in Google Photos. Since then we will not be able to find the photos and videos in the classic gallery of the phone, but they will be in the app and in the cloud, being able to download, edit or do whatever we want with it in the app. In this way we will have much more space again to take more photos, videos or download applications.
You will have to do an online cleaning from time to time
As we mentioned earlier, Google’s free online memory is limited, so maybe every year or every few months we’ll have to move those photos and videos from Google Photos to a computer or hard drive , if you don’t want to pay for an account with more storage. To do this, we recommend using a computer or tablet, opening the Google Photos website in the browser and entering with the same Gmail account that we have on the phone.
Next we are going to mark all the days or elements that we want to remove from the cloud and move to the computer or external memory. Once we have selected it, we are going to touch the three points at the top and then Download. Once we have it saved outside of the cloud, we can proceed to delete it from Google Photos and get the 15 GB free to be free again for when we want to clean the memory of our mobile again.
