Imei: **** iPhone 5S 16GB
Been speaking to Apple support and your store in Cambridge UK. None of the apps downloaded appear to be taking up much space yet I have little memory left. Only had phone since August 2016
<Personal Information Removed by Host>Hello,
Use iTunes to check the storage on your iOS device
More info here:
Check the storage on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support
Your post's title says you have 500MB left. That is less than ⅓ the space you need to have a functioning iPhone!
Check Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage (under Storage). This will show you your biggest space consumers. Start deleting!!
gadgetvirtuoso wrote:
If you have a lot of photos you can save a bunch of space by using iCloud.
Not true. iCloud Photos mirrors what is on your phone. So if you have 1,000 photos in iCloud photos, you will have 1,000 photos on the iPhone. You can turn on the "optimize" feature, which will slightly reduce the size of the images on the phone, but not enough to free up much space. If you think you can save space by deleting photos from the iPhone and leave them in iCloud you will be disappointed, because whenever you delete a photo from the phone it is also deleted from iCloud.
This is definitely one of those your mileage may vary situations. If you have a lot of originals on your device and then turn on optimizations you will see a lot of space recovered. I know when I turned it on I recovered a lot of space, several GB. Someone with only a few pictures wouldn't see much difference.
If you really want to recover space you can offload them to your computer or use a third party service to upload your phones. A lot of people post their photos on social media so do you really need to keep a copy on your phone too? Keep in mind the photos uploaded to Facebook are highly compressed once you upload or even sync them to their site. If you plan to ever print or need the originals this wouldn't be the way to go.
If you want to backup your photos I can definitely recommend Amazon Photo, Flickr or BitTorrentSync (for those will a little more technical known-how). All of these services will retain the original uncompressed images. Google Photos is also good but again they compress photos unless you turn that feature off.
If you have a lot of photos you can save a bunch of space by using iCloud.
Manage your photo and video storage - Apple Support
Yes, 16 GB is not enough storage unless you keep very few photos and only a few songs. That's why the most recent iPhone models start at 32 GB.
Optimizing will save a lot of space. I didn't suggest deleting photos. Most people take a ton of pictures and keep the originals on their device, which isn't necessary.
I just read a thread yesterday from someone who enabled optimization, and reported that the amount of space saved was too small to be measurable.
Is storage an issue with a 16GB I phone as I'm not even a year into my contract and only have 500 mb left. I've just read that cached files and stuff are deleted automatically but I do not think this happens.
