Running Out of Phone Storage? Here’s How WhatsApp Can Help You

Images take a toll on your phone’s storage space, but there’s an easy way to keep that in check.

The Quint
Tech News
Updated:
Images downloaded from WhatsApp get stored on your phone.
i
Images downloaded from WhatsApp get stored on your phone.
(Photo: The quint)

advertisement

Images and videos take the bulk of storage space on your phone. Especially these days, with everyone forwarding images about the coronavirus outbreak, which includes photos about government guidelines, emergence of new cases and details on quarantined homes are doing the rounds on WhatsApp.

After the recently conducted Janata Curfew, a lot of videos were also shared showing people banging plates and applauding the efforts of healthcare personnel in the country.

All these photos and videos end up taking a lot of storage on your phone. And if you're among those who haven't bought cloud storage on Google Drive or even Dropbox then chances are you end up deleting stuff after every few weeks. But this is avoidable, especially if you make the right changes to WhatsApp’s settings.

So, before your phone’s storage fills up, here’s what you should do.

As you can see here, images from WhatsApp are the biggest culprit for running out of storage and thankfully, there’s a way to make sure it doesn’t become the villain in your life.

Head over the Settings on WhatsApp, which can be accessed by clicking on the three dots at the top right of the screen. From there, you need to click on Chats, where you need to disable the Media visibility option. This ensures that none of the newly downloaded media (image/video/audio) is added to the phone’s storage.

(Photo: WhatsApp screen grab)

But let’s say, if you don’t want to disable this feature for everyone, and there are some contacts whose media content you want to be stored on the phone, this is what you need to do.

From the chat window of that particular contact, click on the three dots at the top right, select View Contact and over there you can enable Media visibility, which can be selected from the pop-up box, as seen above.

And if you still can’t manage the storage space on phone, it’s time you look at other (paid) alternatives to get through it. Like buying some drive storage, perhaps?

(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)

Published: 29 Apr 2019,05:53 PM IST

ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL FOR NEXT