| Cult of Mac

Free up space on an iPhone and iPad

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Get some space back on your phone to install the upcoming iOS 16 beta.
Get some space back on your phone to install the upcoming iOS 16 beta.
Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

If you have an older phone, you may struggle with storage space. The iPhone 6s and first iPhone SE, the oldest devices to run iOS 15, shipped with as little as 16 GB of storage space. Even the 7th generation iPod Touch, a product that was long in the tooth when it debuted, shipped with 32 GB on the base model. How can you clear iPhone storage when you have such little wiggle room?

Perhaps you’re dedicated to keeping your old phone working until the iPhone 14 models are released this September. Maybe you need to clear up space on a spare device to install the anticipated developer beta of iOS 16 when it is released this June.

Whatever the case, read on to clear storage on your iPhone and iPad.

Save Space On Your Hard Drive – Delete System Logs And QuickLook Cache Files [OS X Tips]

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QuickLook and System Logs

There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.

QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.

Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.

Save space on your Mac hard drive: Delete user cache files [OS X Tips]

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Delete User Cache Files

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.

Move Your iPhoto Library To An External Drive To Save Space [OS X Tips]

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iPhotoLib

Most of us have considered moving out iTunes library to an external hard drive to save space at one time or another. If you use a MacBook Air, you know how squeezzed for space you can feel after using a laptop with a much bigger hard drive. Heck, we’ve even written about saving space via iTunes migration.

But what about iPhoto? True, pictures take up less space than iTunes videos, or even MP3 tracks, but more and more these days we’re taking photos with huge pixel counts with similarly large file sizes. And what about all the movies we use our iPhones or cameras for? They eat up a lot of space, too. So, you might at some point want to move all the photos and home movies you manage in iPhoto to an external drive to save space. Here’s how.