PhotoiPhone storage full? Move photos and videos to your PC and free up space
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Quick answer: check Settings › General › iPhone Storage. If Photos is the biggest item (it usually is), copy your largest videos to a Windows PC over USB, check the copies open, then delete them from the iPhone and empty Recently Deleted. Video is almost always where the space went.
Step 1: see what is using the space
On the iPhone, open Settings › General › iPhone Storage. The bar at the top and the list below show which apps use the most. For most people, Photos is at or near the top, and within Photos it is video: one minute of 4K video can be several hundred megabytes, while a photo is a few megabytes. A few long clips can outweigh thousands of pictures.
The iPhone itself does not show you which videos are biggest. PhotoFroggy does: connect the phone, choose Videos and sort largest first, and every category in the sidebar shows its total size.
Step 2: copy the biggest items to your PC
Use any method from how to transfer videos from iPhone to PC. Whatever you use:
- Copy over a USB cable, so you get the full-quality originals.
- Copy to a drive with plenty of free space, ideally one that is itself backed up.
- If some items will not copy, they may be stored only in iCloud. See why some photos won't transfer.
Step 3: check the copies before deleting anything
Open a handful of the copied files on the PC, including the longest videos, and make sure they play to the end. Compare counts: if you copied 214 videos, there should be 214 files. A copy that stopped part-way can look fine in a folder listing and still be incomplete.
PhotoFroggy does this check for you before it deletes anything: an item is only removed from the phone if a file with the same name and exactly the same number of bytes is on your PC.
Step 4: delete from the iPhone and empty Recently Deleted
- In the Photos app, tap Select, choose the items and tap the bin.
- Open Recently Deleted: scroll down to Utilities in the Photos app (on older iOS versions it is under Albums), then unlock it with Face ID or your passcode, tap Select and delete everything there.
Until you empty Recently Deleted, the iPhone keeps deleted items for about 30 days and the space does not come back.
Important: if iCloud Photos is on, deleting a photo or video on the iPhone deletes it from iCloud and from every device signed in to your Apple Account. That is how iCloud Photos works. Make sure your PC copy is the one you want to keep. More detail in how to delete safely after a transfer.
Other ways to free space
- Optimize iPhone Storage (Settings › [your name] › iCloud › Photos) keeps small versions on the phone and full ones in iCloud. It needs an iCloud plan big enough for your whole library.
- Offload unused apps from iPhone Storage; the app's data stays and it reinstalls when you tap it.
- Check Messages attachments: long threads full of videos can take gigabytes.
- Record smaller video in future: Settings › Camera › Record Video shows how much space a minute takes at each setting.