My smartphone has run out of storage. What to do | members only

_I WANT TO FREE UP STORAGE ON MY SMARTPHONE. HOW CAN I FIND OUT WHICH FILES ARE EATING UP ALL THE ROOM?_ I’ve told people that a good way to weed their smartphones of digital clutter is to

get rid of apps they rarely use. But apps aren’t the only reason your smartphone storage is packed to the gills. If your phone is anything like mine, you’re likely bumping up against

capacity limits because of the audio photo and video files on the device. You can certainly free up space by moving these files to the cloud, and generally, that’s a fine option, especially

if you’re willing to pay for extra online storage. But you asked specifically about which files are the main offenders now on your phone, and thus candidates for the scrap heap. Whether you

have an iPhone or an Android, identifying such files and sending them off to pasture is pretty easy. BREAKING DOWN IPHONE STORAGE I’ve used up roughly half the 512 gigabyte (GB) capacity on

my own iPhone 15 Pro Max. You can find out the storage breakdown on your iPhone by launching SETTINGS and tapping GENERAL | IPHONE STORAGE. Apple displays a simple color bar graph showing

everything taking up space on the phone, categorized by applications, messages, music, photos, mail and so on. Apple then suggests ways to free up space. The top recommendation is to REVIEW

LARGE ATTACHMENTS, which reveals the photos, videos and attachments eating away storage. I could save up to 40.18 GB on my own phone by deleting all such large attachments, Apple said. But I

want to cherry-pick the attachments I might be willing to discard and suspect you would, too. Tap the RIGHT POINTING ARROW > to view these attachments by size order, along with a

thumbnail of the files and the date from which they were from. To get rid of some or all of the attachments, tap EDIT in the upper right corner of the screen, then tap your finger on the

circle to place a checkmark beside each of the files you want to delete. Tap the TRASH CAN symbol at the upper right corner of the screen to complete the exorcism. Apple’s next

recommendation is to AUTO DELETE OLD CONVERSATIONS, which on my device could save up to 29.37 GB. This grouping consists of all messages and attachments sent or received more than a year

ago. To automatically get rid of these, tap ENABLE and then ENABLE again. BE AWARE: If you choose this option, all messages and attachments older than a year will continue to be discarded.

REVIEW DOWNLOADED MEDIA is next on the list. Here, I was told I could save up to 1.33GB by removing downloaded videos and audio files. Again, I can see what these files are by tapping the

RIGHT-POINTING ARROW >.