Free up iCloud space in 15 minutes on your iPhone

I feel like I'm always in a battle with iCloud storage on my iPhone, but we can be tough guys

because you know what? Let's just admit offloading your photos and videos can be a messy task

That said, I have found a quick fix to free up some space. I'm going to share three steps that

you can follow right now. This is going to take you 15 minutes and you won't have to pay Apple

for more storage. I speak from experience because when I run out of storage, I often just take the

easy way out and I pay for more. I never delete anything. I mean, look at this. I was taking

photos of fireworks, but you know what? I don't need 190 photos of fireworks, but this is who I

have become. Maybe this is who you have become and stuff like this is why I filled up two terabytes

of iCloud storage. Apple is happy to solve this by taking more of my money to give me more storage

but there comes a time where you have to say no and actually delete something or move it to

a backup drive. I'm bringing this up because you need to know how to manage your iCloud account

for iOS 27. iCloud storage is tied into some of Apple's new AI tools. Stick around. I'm going to

explain how, but right now let's do this together. Don't wait. I'm going to walk you through easy

things you could do on your iPhone right now with me. Let's play out some space together

Start with finding your largest video files first. You're going to move them out and make the biggest

impact you're gonna go to settings click on your name to see your Apple account

then click on iCloud click on recommended for you these are tools

Apple offers to tweak your iCloud you're gonna scroll to the section that says

free up storage review your photos and videos now click to get started here Apple tells you a few things you can do I want you to click into videos and here you going to see the largest video files up high

So you can target everything here at the top. Up here I have a video that's from seven years ago

It's over two gigs in size and I dropped my phone in a couch cushion and recorded nothing for 15

minutes. This is not a keepsake. We can go ahead and delete that. Okay. Now I need to offload some

of the bigger memories, all sorts of videos of my kids being cute, videos of birthday presents

being unwrapped. So we're going to offload this to another hard drive. Now at this point, you could

airdrop this to a computer, or if you have a portable hard drive or a thumb drive, you could

just plug it in directly and move it to the drive. Now to do that, you're not going to click

airdrop you're going to click export unmodified original now pick where you want it to save you'll

have to put it in the right drive not icloud of course you might need to click the back button to

find where you want it but once you got your place click save and it'll go on the drive now you can

also batch select a bunch of photos or videos at once into a folder i find that i get errors if i

do too many files at once something always seems to glitch on me but at least here if you do it one

video at a time you are getting the biggest videos out first once that's complete i need you to

remember which videos you saved to the other hard drive or the other computer because once they're

moved over you can go ahead and delete them next we're going to go through duplicate photos and

other junk like screenshots. You going to go back into iCloud settings to find these as other recommendations for freeing up your storage Duplicates is easy to handle Sometimes we just get two versions of something because we sending photos to friends

or maybe you forgot you saved something twice. Apple just pulls it all together for you

You can select these quickly to merge the files or delete what you do not want

And now we're going to clear out the junk in old screenshots

I save screenshots a lot as a way to send myself reminders

and clearly I don't remember what I did with all these so I forgot, goodbye, forgotten screenshots

You're just gonna wipe all of these by selecting all of your old stuff

and you might wanna keep some of the recent ones from the past week or two just in case

In the iCloud settings, there is more to poke around if you have time

Another big area might be messages. I have over 147 gigs inside my messages

and I'm afraid to just delete it all So I will chip away at this area later

It depends how much time you have to delete things, but it does show you the biggest files first up top

Now, the final step to cleaning up is that when you delete photos and video

they're not really deleted right away. You have to go into your recently deleted folder

inside the Photos app and then delete from here. Poof, now you finally have your storage back

Congratulations. Go back into your iCloud settings page and see if that worked to get you enough space

to do a system backup. If nothing else, I hope it stops nagging you

that you ran out of storage space. So for a little while now, I have been testing out the iOS 27 beta

It uses a Siri app and I was getting a big pop-up on top

letting me know I ran out of iCloud space. And that meant it could not sync my Siri conversations

on my iPhone with my Mac. Now much of these new Apple intelligence tools are designed to sync across your devices So a conversation you have with Siri AI on one device can be there on other devices

and it syncs privately through iCloud with end-to-end encryption. Now, if I wanted to get that message off my Siri app

I had to free up space or disable iCloud syncing. The same kind of syncing happens if I use image playground to generate images

and the type of iCloud Plus plan you have will impact what you can do with Apple Intelligence

That's because image generation is going to have daily usage limits. But Apple says most iCloud Plus subscription plans

will offer increased access, meaning you can get a little bit more play time with it

And it also includes AI tools for going through home camera footage

When iOS 27 does launch for the public in a couple of months

We should find out more details. Now, if you're in a family of other iPhone users

you may want to consider paying for an Apple One bundle instead of just paying for more iCloud storage

because it can boost your iCloud storage while also giving you access

to other Apple subscription services. I pay for Apple One Premiere so I can share two terabytes of storage with my husband

and it is a little pricey, but that's because I'm also using Apple's other services too

like Music and Apple TV and News Plus, so it works out well for my needs

But when I filled up the iCloud storage, that meant my husband couldn't back up his phone

And yeah, that motivated me to find a quick fix. And I know there are better ways to be more responsible with doing more backups

So if you have a method, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I am inspired now to see if there are easier ways to do this, such as using Apple shortcuts tools

Let's all help each other save some storage space and save our money

And I'll catch you next time when there's one more thing to talk about in the world of Apple