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If you’ve ever managed files on your computer, you know that it can be quite simple most of the time. There are drives, and in those drives there are folders. In those folders there are files. You can open them, move them, and delete what you don’t need (except in some special circumstances). It’s easy to organize in specific ways, by file size, for example, to make managing them much easier.
Connect your Android phone to your computer, and you’ll find much of the same. There are folders and files, making it quick and easy to transfer or back up data and clean up the large files that fill up your phone.
But if you connect your iPhone, all bets are off. Can anything be done to make it Managing files on iPhone is easier? The answer is yes… sort of.
The problem
My wife recently got one Scary warning messages that your iPhone’s storage space is full. Apple helpfully explains how much storage space different types of data take up. If you’ve ever encountered a similar warning, you’ve probably noticed that a large portion of this space is images and videos. This was the case for my wife, and I thought a quick scan to delete the largest ones, which are often 4K, would free up a lot of space.
This turned out to be true, but the process of removing them turned out to be more problematic than I expected.
Clearing out your iPhone’s storage can be difficult.
Access files on iPhone
Accessing files on iPhone is not very difficult. You can browse them freely on the phone itself, although it’s not always easy to know when a file is there on iPhone or already stored in iCloud and only visible on the phone. This is a fairly slow way to manage files. What’s worse is that Apple doesn’t provide a way to quickly see which files are larger. Therefore, quick scanning of unnecessary large files is not possible. The best thing to do here is to simply view only the videos and sift through them one by one.
Alternatively, you can connect your iPhone to your computer. After accepting the prompt on the device, it will display its photo library on the computer. That’s a good start, but it’s still not ideal. It divides the library into folders based on the month the content was captured. If you’ve owned your phone for a few years, that means you’ll be looking through dozens of folders. Checking the folder size again is one process at a time.
Read also: The slow way to recover your iPhone storage without losing a single photo
To simplify the process, I thought of making backup copies of all the folders from the older year, and then bulk deleting them from the phone. no. Not only does the iPhone seem to have a tendency to reject large file offloads by partially timing out the backup, but it also refuses to allow folders to be deleted. So, to ensure data integrity, I suppose the process becomes a tedious little nightmare: copy the folder > make sure the copy was successful > open the folder > select all files > delete all files > move to the next folder > repeat. For a few years’ worth of folders and relying on phone USB 2.0 speeds of 480Mbps, this becomes a long and tedious process that doesn’t effectively target the original goal of scanning large files.
There are solutions
I thought I was missing something. There had to be a better way. I already knew that Google Drive was dead. Sure, Wi-Fi uploads can exceed USB 2.0 speeds, but not always by much. Also, after reviewing a few iPhones over the years, I found this every time When I try to upload a batch of photos to Google Drive, my iPhone will fail to complete all uploads and won’t offer to try again or even indicate in any way which files didn’t make the jump.
Sure, there’s iCloud. Everything there can be backed up and deleted from iPhone. But this is a Expensive solution This is actually rewarding Apple for not having a better way for iPhone owners to clean up their phone’s storage space.
Yes, the iPhone’s Files app He can Sort files by file size. This is a great way to tackle some of the larger junk files on your phone. However, this doesn’t combine with a quick way to back up the file elsewhere, nor does it let you see the photos and videos on your camera roll.
There is a workaround to display photos and videos in the Files app, or at least it appears that way. You can go to the Photos app, and select all your photos/videos either one by one, or if they’re in a group, by tapping Select All. Then you select file sharing. From there, you can see them in files, sort them by size and even (apparently) delete them.
So what’s the problem with that? For one thing, this still doesn’t help support them elsewhere. But more importantly, It does not delete the original files. When the Photos app shares these files with the Files app, it creates copies to share, and when you delete them in the Files app, it just deletes the copies, leaving the original in place, which takes up space.
I checked the Windows Photos app, which has an iPhone sync feature. It displays all local images in one pane, shows file sizes and allows bulk selection and deletion. However, it also does not allow sorting by file size or type. It will allow you to import items, but then they will be deselected in the phone, so you cannot delete them right away. If you toggle off “Show selected items only” before importing, you can quickly reselect and delete items you’ve imported. It’s a step in the right direction for quick backups and deletions, but it doesn’t help in targeting large files for easier file management.
I also checked Apple’s hardware app for Windows, iTunes, and Windows Phone Link. None of these can do the job either. In fact, Apple’s Devices app is trying to make me fill my iPhone with more photos from my computer.
Back up your iPhone to your Mac.
Just to cover my bases, I tried Mac too. The Photos app on Mac can display iPhone photos and let you import and then delete them, but it also doesn’t have any sorting methods to help quickly see what’s worth deleting. A Mac doesn’t have better access to your phone’s photo library file structure than Windows. On a Mac, accessing your iPhone in Finder brings up sync settings. You can sync photos, but you can’t manage them. You can manage storage space, but only for movies, shows, songs, podcasts, audiobooks, and books — not photos and videos from your camera.
Read also: How to free up your iPhone’s storage space by deleting data you don’t need
Useful tool
Hitting a wall at every turn led me to wander online, where I found a glimmer of hope. There is a workaround of sorts, even if it’s not the one I was hoping for.
A true genius among us recognized the problem and used shortcuts To create the kind of tool Apple should have had all along. In the Shortcuts app, they created a quick mechanism that parses the video library, sorts it by size, and then creates a new album containing the 30 largest video files. From there, you can then go to the Photos app, open that new album and select which of those large files you want to delete. Unfortunately, while this helps with cleanup great, it doesn’t help with backing up the files first. So it separates the process into backup and deletion, rather than moving or unpacking. It’s a good place to start, though.
Although this method still doesn’t improve your iPhone’s file management options, it at least helps free up space so your iPhone can get back to working properly… even if Correctly No mean comfortable.
