Big Files on iPhone: How to Free Up Space Faster
Where are the big files on iPhone, and how to free up space fast: set the feed to Largest and clear the heaviest videos first. Plus other feed orders.
Where are the big files on an iPhone, and how do you free up space faster than a week of sorting? Most often it is not thousands of photos that eat the memory, but a few dozen files. A long concert video. A screen recording nobody stopped. A film downloaded for a trip three years ago. One such file weighs as much as a thousand photos.
So that is where to start.
How do you find the biggest files?
In Spohad the feed has an order. You change it with the “Tools” button, in the “Order” section. If you choose Largest, the feed runs from the heaviest files to the lightest, across all folders at once.
First up comes that concert video of several gigabytes. You watch five seconds and decide: keep in Memories, move to a USB drive, or the Trash. Next, a screen recording of a gigabyte and a half. Trash. In ten minutes you can win back more space than in a week of ordinary sorting.
When everything is in the Photos gallery
An honest caveat here. Spohad knows file size for files in the phone’s folders, in iCloud Drive, on a USB drive, in network storage. But for pictures in the Photos gallery there is no size to order by. So in Largest, gallery frames come at the end, after all the files. And if the feed consists only of the gallery, there will simply be no size orders in the list.
What to do in that case: first move the heavy stuff, videos and screen recordings, from the gallery into folders (how is in How to free up space on your iPhone), and then clean them up there, from biggest to smallest.
The other orders
There are four pairs of orders. The first tap picks one side, the second flips it.
- Shuffled / In order. Shuffled is why Spohad feels like social media: the feed is put together from different folders and years, every frame is shown once per round, and you don’t know what comes next. In order: files go as they lie.
- Newest / Oldest. Sort out what piled up in the last week. Or the other way round: start with the oldest frames and go through your life from the beginning.
- Largest / Smallest. Largest, to free up space fast. Smallest, to clear a heap of small stuff: screenshots, pictures, tiny files that just get in the way.
- Most valued / Least valued. Most valued puts the frames with the most value first. Least valued puts first what has no value yet: the right time to take a look at it.
The chosen order is one for all feeds. Change it and it works both in Sort and in a folder you open to look at. For example, “Shuffled” in a single folder turns it into a trainer; that is how a student reviews exam questions, read Exam flashcards on iPhone.
Will I delete something I shouldn’t in the heat of it?
No. Nothing is deleted until Save. All decisions pile up in Changes, and any of them can be taken back until you apply it. And deletion from the gallery is confirmed separately by iOS.
Quick guide: how to free up iPhone space fast
- Open “Tools” → “Order” and choose Largest.
- Go through the first thirty to fifty files: that gives you the most space.
- Heavy and unneeded: to the Trash; needed: to a folder on a USB drive or drive.
- Switch to “Shuffled” and just scroll, sorting along the way.
- Press Save and look at the result: how much space came back.
Order is a mood
The nicest thing about orders is that the feed can be different every time. Today you are clearing memory and going from biggest. Tomorrow you want to remember childhood, and you turn on “Oldest.” The day after you just relax, and it is “Shuffled” again, as in A social media alternative.
The same archive, but every evening is a different story. Try the feed on the home page.