Accumulated data junk How to free your cell phone from WhatsApp memory hogs
Anyone who likes to share photos or videos via WhatsApp sooner or later has a problem with storage space. But with a few simple steps, you can quickly get things back in order.
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- Under "Manage storage" in WhatsApp, you can display and sort the biggest space hogs such as media and chats.
- Users can quickly remove media by marking and deleting multiple files. Important: Deleted files cannot be restored without a backup.
- Alternative solutions: Chats can be exported or files can be deleted directly in the photo gallery, although the system often saves them in a temporary recycle bin first.
WhatsApp offers a practical tool to see which chats and files are taking up a particularly large amount of storage space. To do this, go to Settings in the app and then to Storage and data. Under Manage storage, you can see how much memory WhatsApp is using in total. Chats and media that take up a lot of space appear at the top of the list.
If you click on a specific chat, you will be taken to the Media, Links and Docs folder. All files are sorted by size there. This gives you a good overview of which videos and images you are most likely to delete.
How to delete specific media
- Tap and hold your finger on the desired file until it is highlighted.
- Select more files if you want to delete several at once.
- Press the trash can icon to delete the selected media.
Important: The deleted files cannot be easily restored afterwards. If you still want to access the data again, we recommend making a backup beforehand. For Android devices, for example, a Google Drive backup is suitable, while iPhone users can back up their data via iCloud.
It also works on a larger scale
An alternative to deleting content is to export entire chats. This combines the text messages and media in a file that you can save outside of the app. This is particularly useful for important conversations that you no longer want to keep on your device for space reasons.
Exporting is simple:
Export chats and save them externally
- Select the Export chat option in the chat window.
- Decide whether you want to include the media or just export the text.
- Save the file in a secure location, for example in a cloud or on your computer.
Alternative: Clean up in the WhatsApp photo gallery folder
For users who want to tidy up their photo gallery directly, there is another option to the clean-up methods presented so far. All received and sent media are collected in the WhatsApp folder of the gallery. However, browsing there is often less clear than in the app itself. In addition, the files are not completely deleted immediately, depending on the operating system. Many devices first move them to a temporary recycle bin before the system permanently deletes the files after a certain period of time.
