How to free up space on your Android phone or Tablet

Is your Internal and microSD card storage filling up? Here are some quick ways to reclaim storage space.

Follow @jtechpreneur

Hello tech fans, today lets interact about one thing that annoys me, LOW STORAGE SPACE! Don't know how much it annoys you, to me I relate to this quote "Fear is what keeps us alive". As much as I can get annoyed to want to smash my phone, its all I have and earns me money: the fear of breaking it is what keeps it alive.Whether it's 16GB, 32GB or 200GB, whatever space you're given it just ends up filling up. Most phones with high end cameras come with bigger internal storage capacity because most photos and videos taken are more than 4MB.

I compiled most of the tricks I use and here are some of the easy ways to free up storage on your Android device -- both the internal storage and microSD.

Clear the cache

First if you need to clear up space on your phone quickly, the app cache is the first place you should look. Many Android apps use stored -- or cached -- data to give you a better user experience. Cached data can save a little time (and mobile data), but the files stored in app caches are for convenience and are not strictly necessary because over a long period of time most cached memory are irrelevant.

To clear cached data from a single app, go to Settings > Applications > Application Manager and tap on the app you want to modify. In the app's Application info menu, Scroll down to CACHE then tap Clear cache or for some other Android versions tap Storage and then tap Clear Cache to clear the app's cache.To clear cached data from all apps, go to Settings > Storage and tap Cached data to clear the caches of all the apps on your phone.

Delete your downloads

Your Android phone has a downloads folder where everything you download -- photos, videos, documents and other files -- is stored. Chances are most of the files in your downloads folder are not files you're particularly attached to. So you should be able to free up some storage space by deleting these unnecessary files.
You'll find your downloads folder -- which might be called My Files or File Manager -- in your app drawer. Tap and hold a file to select it, then tap the trash can icon, the remove button or the delete button to get rid of it.

Delete your Apps (Whatsapp) Sent Files

This is one section many people don't know of because it is hidden and cannot be views from the gallery section. When you connect your Android phone to your computer and enter WhatsApp or Viber images you'll see it or by going to your  folder in your My Files folder in your phone's app drawer then scroll to WhatsApp or any other Instant Messaging App and select it then tap on Images or Videos. Under Images or Videos folder you'll find the Sent folder either at the top or bottom of other images.

Delete those photos and videos because am sure you have replicas in its original location.

Compress photos in gallery 

If you have a photo editor and compressor in your computer you can compress photos that are in your Android phone by connecting it to the computer and accessing the particular photos or folder from the software. I recommend Microsoft Office Picture Manager either 2007 or 2010, they work magics for me. 

After connecting your Android phone to your computer and accessing files from File Explorer, go to the folder containing the photos you want to compress then select it, right click on the photo you want to compress then select Open with... from the menu. On the drop down menu from Open with, select Microsoft Office 2007/2010. If you don't want that process you can just open Microsoft Office Picture  Manager then on top of the software Menu bar select File > Open then located the photo(s). 

In Microsoft Office Picture Manager go to Edit Picture after selecting it then a side bar menu tools will appear, Compression option is the last option at the bottom. Select it and you will see several compression formats you can choose from. The best is Documents because it compresses the photo and the photo will not lose it's quality.

Backing up files with a USB OTG

A USB OTG (USB On - The - GO)is a USB device or a USB cable that allows USB devices, such as digital audio players or mobile phones, to act as a host, allowing other USB devices, such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mice or keyboards, to be attached to them. 

To learn more about the USB OTG and how to get one or make one, Click here

Google Photos backup

Guess what? Google Photos lets you back up an unlimited number of photos. In other words, you can back up every single photo you take with your Android phone directly to Google Photos, and it will not count against your Google Drive space. Once your photos are backed up, you can delete them from your device to free up space. You can also synchronize your Photos with Google Photos so that whenever you are on Wi-Fi all photos get backed up automatically. The problem with Synchronizing is if you are a person who takes private photos I'd advice you don't synchronize automatically but just back them up manually.

First you will need to turn on Google Photos' Back up & sync feature to take advantage of all this free cloud storage space. To do this, open the Google Photos app and go to Settings > Back up & sync and turn it on.
You can choose to back up your photos at "high quality" resolution -- up to 16 megapixels -- or to back them up at the original size. Google Photos only offers unlimited storage for "high quality" photos, and any photos backed up at the original size will count against your Google Drive storage limit.

Once you've backed up your photos using Google Photos, you can go to Settings > Free up device storage, and Google Photos will delete any photos and videos that have been backed up.

Move apps to the microSD card

Apps probably take up most of the storage space on your phone. If you've got an Android phone that lets you add a microSD card for extra storage, you may be able to move some of your storage-sucking apps to that microSD card.
To do this, open Settings and go to Applications > Application manager and tap the app you want to move.

If the app can be moved, you will see a button that says Move to SD card -- tap this button to move the app to the microSD card. (On some phones, you may have to tap Storage to find this option.) Only part of the app will be moved to the microSD card. How much of the app will be moved depends on the app and, unfortunately, many large games will not move a significant portion of their data to the microSD card.

Move apps to the trash

If you've tried all of these tips and you still need more space, there's no getting around it -- you're going to have to start deleting some things. You've probably got some (maybe several) apps on your device that you never use.

To figure out which apps are taking up the most space, open Settings and go to Storage > Apps. You'll see a list of apps sorted by size -- the biggest apps will the at the top of the list.

To delete an app you don't use, tap the app and then tap the "i" icon next to the app's name.

Tap uninstall to get rid of the app.

Hope I have helped, if you know of other was please feel free to share below on the Comments section. For IOS users, give me less that 24hours to post yours. Meanwhile check out other articles and don't forget to Like, Share and Tweet about this article and Follow us on Twitter,Google+ and Facebook. Remember "Sharing is caring".

READ MORE: What is USB ON-THE-GO and why must you have it?
  

Follow @jtechpreneur