Running out of smartphone storage? Here's how to get more

When you purchase a new smartphone it has plenty of storage space, but it might not take long before you get a warning you're about to run out.

If you run out of storage, you could be prevented from taking photos or storing other files until you deal with your data overload.

With about 33 million smartphones in Canada, they’re the go-to device for photos, music, podcasts — among a myriad of other tasks — and every time you download something, you’re taking up storage.

Luckily, there may be a few things cluttering up your phone you can remove in order to clear space.

Marisa Malvetti loves taking photos of her children, but all those pictures started filling up her phone.

“I bought a phone with 256 GB of storage because I was constantly running into this issue where I max out my phone storage and couldn’t use it anymore,” Malvetti told CTV News Toronto Friday.

Consumer Reports advises of some quick and easy steps to free up storage on your phone without sacrificing your data.

Tech editor Melanie Pinola said it all starts with a little detective work.

“The first thing you need to do is look into your phone and see what’s actually taking up so much space,” Pinola said.

To check an Android phone, go to settings, then battery and device care, and click on storage.

On an iPhone go to settings, then general, and click on iPhone storage.

If your phone is photo-heavy, you can offload pictures and videos to cloud-based storage such as iCloud or Google Photos, or move them to a computer or external hard drive.

You can also optimize your photos which means full resolution pics are stored on the cloud, while smaller versions remain on your phone.

If music is what you’re hoarding, you may want to stream your music — as there’s really no need to download and store music on your phone and that goes for podcasts too.

Some people are also using apps that take up a lot of storage.

"All of a sudden, I’m running out of space and it’s because I have these old apps I don’t even use anymore,” Pinola said.

In that case, you can delete old apps or offload them which removes the app, but keeps the data related to them, so you can always download them again and pick up where you left off.

In addition, ensure you check how many text messages you’re storing — especially those with shared photos, videos and gifs which can take up space. You can clear out big text attachments on the iPhone storage screen.

Another tip is to change your settings to save your text messages for a year, or 30 days, instead of indefinitely.

It’s also a good idea to back-up your smartphone for security reasons because — even though malware and ransomware attacks on your phone are rare — they can happen, or you could lose or break your phone.

If you do, you'll be safe knowing your photos and other files are saved somewhere else.