These methods will work on all Samsung Galaxy phones, so no need to wonder if this will work on the latest Galaxy S smartphone or not. And you don’t need any additional apps to do this. Though the Files by Google app is a good one to use, it’s not necessary however. So without further ado, here’s how you can free up storage on your Samsung Galaxy phone.
How to free up storage on your Samsung Galaxy smartphone
There are essentially two ways that you can free up storage on your smartphone. The first is using Samsung’s own Storage Booster, which will automatically clear up some storage for you. Deleting things like duplicate images, zip files, etc. The other is to do it manually. We’re going to walk you through doing both of these, so you can pick and choose which method you want to use. It’s important to note that the Samsung Storage Booster is not available on all devices, newer devices don’t have it built-in. But you can still download it from the various app stores.
Samsung Storage Booster
To get to the Samsung Storage Booster, you’ll need to download it from Google Play or the Samsung app store. It’s no longer built into the operating system, with One UI unfortunately. With Storage Booster, you can also opt to move apps to the SD card, as well as delete duplicate images, zip files, extracted APKs and more. You’ll also want to turn on “Auto Delete unnecessary data”, which can save you quite a bit of storage in the long run. This can be run daily, weekly, every 15 days or monthly. You’ll also get notified when this happens. However, if you don’t want to download the Samsung Storage Booster (on newer phones) you can opt to do it manually. Which some people may prefer anyways.
Manually
To clear up storage manually, you’ll want to head to the storage screen. To do this:
Go to Settings.Tap on “Battery and device care”.Next, tap on “Storage”.
From there, you can see what is using up your storage, and also clear out each category. For example, if you have backed up all of your photos and videos to Google Photos, you can go through and delete those photos and videos. That can really save a lot of storage too. To do this, tap on the three dots in the corner, and then tap on “Edit”. Now you can select the images you want to delete, and press the “delete” button at the bottom of the page.
This can be done for videos, audio files, documents, installation files and more. Now when it comes to apps, it’ll ask you to give the My Files app permission to read your apps. Then you can sort by apps using the most data. Or you can sort by those that were last used. This is helpful, because you can scroll to the bottom and delete apps that you don’t use much or at all, delete those and save some space that way.
Additionally, towards the bottom of the storage screen, you’ll see Trash, which shows what’s in trash but not actually deleted yet. You can empty the trash to get some space back. And then there is a spot for “Large files”. Tap on that to see the large files on your phone that you can delete. This would typically be videos, since they are usually the largest. You can also do all of this, and a bit more with Google’s own My Files app, which is available on the Google Play Store. But this is an easy way to clear up some space on your Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Clear out your storage routinely
It’s a good idea to clear out your storage routinely, whether that’s once a week, twice a month, or once a month. This is a good idea because stuff can build up and before you know it, you’re out of storage. It’s never a good idea to use all of your storage, because then you don’t have any room left for taking pictures, downloading apps in a pinch and it can also make your phone run slower. Just like phones run slower when all the RAM is being used, phones also run slower when all of the storage is being used. So make sure to go through your storage every so often. Just like you clean your house every few months for Spring Cleaning and again in the fall after Summer is over, you should be doing the same for your smartphone. It’s going to make your life a lot easier. However, we would warn you against some of those cache cleaner apps that are out there. Some are full of malware and could infect your device. Luckily, most Android makers have a way to clear out storage built-into the phone. Or you can use Google’s own app. Which is not the best, but it gets the job done.
