How to free up storage on your iPhone

Step one: look at the real numbers first

Open Settings > General > iPhone Storage. iOS lists every app with the space it occupies, biggest first, and it separates the app itself from its documents and data. Before you delete a single photo, read that list. If Messages or a video app sits at the top, your camera roll is not the problem and cleaning it will not help much.

Photos is usually near the top, and if it is, the rest of this page applies.

Step two: the free routes, in order of payoff

Every one of these is built into iOS. None of them needs a third party app, and it is worth working through them before you install anything.

Where the space hides	How to get it back	Worth knowing
Recently Deleted	Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted > Select > Delete All	Holds everything you have deleted in the last 30 days, and all of it still counts against your storage.
Exact duplicate photos	Photos > Albums > Utilities > Duplicates > Merge	Built into iOS 16 and later. It finds exact duplicates only and keeps the highest quality version.
Screenshots	Photos > Albums > Media Types > Screenshots	Select and delete in bulk. The album exists on every iPhone and costs nothing.
Message attachments	Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Messages	iOS lists the largest photos, videos and attachments so you can remove them directly.
App data you no longer need	Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Offload App	Offloading keeps your documents and removes the app binary. Reinstalling restores your data.

Step three: the part iOS does not do for you

Apple's Duplicates album is genuinely useful and everyone should run it. It is also deliberately narrow. It looks for exact duplicates, which means the twenty near identical frames from one burst are not duplicates as far as it is concerned, and they are frequently the largest pile in a camera roll. iOS also gives you no size figure per group, so you cannot tell whether merging a set is worth the tap.

The same gap applies to videos. iOS has no view that says "here are your videos, largest first, with their file sizes", which is exactly the list you want when you are trying to free several gigabytes quickly.

Step four: where a cleaner earns its place

This is the part Nixly does. It scans your library on the phone and sorts what it finds into four groups, each with a measured total in bytes:

• Exact duplicates, matched on the image's pixel dimensions together with a 64 bit fingerprint taken from the picture itself.
• Similar shots, meaning bursts and near identical frames, compared only between photos taken within 60 seconds of each other and kept in a category of their own so they never inflate the duplicate count.
• Screenshots, with a measured size rather than an estimate.
• Large videos, meaning anything of 50 MB or more, sorted biggest first.

In every group the best copy is selected to keep: highest resolution first, then largest file, then newest. It is marked and left out of the selection, so the safe outcome is the default one.

Step five: empty Recently Deleted, or none of it counted

This is the step almost every storage guide buries. When you delete a photo, on iPhone it goes to the Recently Deleted album and stays there for 30 days. During those 30 days the file is still on your phone and still occupies the same space. Your storage figure does not move.

Go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted, tap Select, then Delete All. That is the moment the gigabytes come back. It is also why so many cleaner apps get one star reviews saying "freed 0 GB": they announced the saving at the wrong step.

Nixly shows this on the result screen after every clean-up and gives you a button that opens the Photos app so you can finish. There is a longer explanation on why your storage is still full after deleting photos.

A note on iCloud Photos

If Optimize iPhone Storage is on in Settings > Photos, your phone already keeps smaller versions of older pictures locally and the full resolution originals live in iCloud. Deleting a photo then frees less local space than its full size suggests, and it also removes the picture from iCloud and from your other devices. That is a real trade and worth knowing before you start.