WhatsApp and Google Photos tricks to get more space

When someone changes their mobile phone, there are certain reasons that are more common than others. It is possible for someone to change their smartphone because it was broken, lost or stolen, but… What is common is that it has reached the end of its useful life for two other reasons.. The first is that the battery has deteriorated so much that it is no longer fit for the same use as it was when you purchased it.

The second is that you have run out of space. In the last years We see how manufacturers are increasingly offering more internal memory, With companies like OPPO or Vivo starting at 256GB on their mid-range mobile phones. Even Samsung’s latest tablets start at 512€ in the S9+ and S9 Ultra models.

But there are still many people who have a mobile phone for two or three years, With capacities closer to 64 or 128 GB Which can fill at a much higher rate than we might think. For this reason, it’s a good idea to free up space on your phones whenever possible.

WhatsApp deceives

In Spain, it is quite normal to use your mobile phone to communicate via WhatsApp. This application is actually the means of sending messages, photos, videos and audio recordings in Spanish territory, although there are other alternatives. The problem is It is used so much that the application ends up taking up a lot of space Within our mobile, not through the application, but through attachments. When it was born as a text messaging app, many users had the perception that it did not use much space, but that changed when it jumped into storing multimedia content.

Sending photos and videos is normal, and only a few people stop to delete them when they don’t need them or have already seen them. next to, Android’s cache system means that by default they are stored without a datewhich results in big numbers in GB when you see how much space this app takes up.

The way to free up space is to delete all the information in the application. This is something that only those who do not have any valuable information in the program will be able to do Delete files with the largest weight. The rest have functionality at their disposal in Settings -> Storage & Data -> Manage Storage. This section shows items that have been forwarded multiple times, those larger than 5MB, and we can even filter by groups. There is always one where more memes and videos are sent than necessary and hence they can be deleted.

Google Images to the rescue

The second app that can help free up space is Google Photos. This service has a free version that allows you to store up to 15 GB of photos and videos in the cloud. What a lot of people don’t know is that It is possible to delete them from our mobile phone only when we make a backup on the servers. This way, it is impossible to delete an item that has not been copied online.

To use this function, you have to open Google Photos, click on your avatar in the upper right corner and Select the Free Space option. At the bottom of the screen, a button will appear with the text “Edit X GB of data” where X is the amount of space we will have.

It is important to know that if you want to view any of your uploaded images It will be necessary to have an internet connection. If you want to download a video or photo from time to time, it is also possible to do so from the app itself.

Archiving applications

In April this year, Google announced a new feature for the Google Play Store aimed at helping those who have little available space on their mobile phones. It was on the verge of Archive applications. With this feature, you can keep apps installed on your mobile phone that you don’t use often, but don’t want to delete.

This feature can be activated in the Play Store at Settings -> General -> Automatically archive apps. The system will detect applications that have not been used for a long time and will archive them. When we want to use it again, we will simply have to click on its icon and the necessary plugins will be downloaded.

other options

To these three options you can add other more aggressive options, e.g Uninstall apps we never use Or do not use games that fill several gigabytes of our terminal, if there is an option not to use them. You can also use lite versions of apps, such as those from Google, which have the moniker Go.

What doesn’t help, and isn’t necessary to do, is deleting things like contacts from your phonebook, text messages within apps like WhatsApp, etc. All these elements practically do not occupy anything, and their removal will not help solve the problem of space on the mobile phone.

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