[CONTINUED FROM PART 1]

So you’ve offloaded all the incidental and unnecessary files that helped trigger your “out of space” alert but it still pops up from time to time. Or you see that your iPhone storage graph is hovering below 10% free space and know it’s only a matter to time. After all, you don’t want to find your phone suddenly out of space while taking a video of your best friend’s wedding.

Other than upgrading to an iPhone with more storage - always an option - you need to take stock and make some decisions about your relationship with Apple Photos. Because that’s what it is, after all.

First off, the easy course is to Optimize your Apple Photos Library using iCloud. This clever feature stores the full Original-sized photos and videos in your iCloud Photos Library and replaces them on your iPhone with a much smaller Preview-sized version. It’s a huge space savings as the Optimized library on your iPhone is 3% the size of your Originals. If you use iCloud now then it’s likely your Apple Photos Library is already Optimized, but it's worth checking. If you aren’t using iCloud, then setting it up is by far the easiest way to finesse the whole storage conundrum.

But if you’ve already done that, it’s time to look at your photo strategy and make it work for you.

Managing your photos comes down to 3 options:

• Eliminate duplicates.

• Reduce clutter.

• Curate content.

That’s it.

Understand we’re not talking about organizing here. We’re simply trying to lighten the balloon enough so we don’t crash (I.e., run out of space at an awkward moment).

And it’s easier than you think.

DE-DUPLICATING

De-duplicating is shockingly easy in Apple Photos, thanks to the addition of the Duplicates tool in Utilities. In old libraries you may find that 20-50% of the pictures are duplicates, or are so similar that they might as well be. Apple Photos actually merges the information (metadata) from all duplicates and keeps the best quality version in your Library. The lesser one(s) get deleted.

DE-CLUTTERING

De-cluttering is more manual, but not that hard once you get the hang of it. You know the 7 shots your server took of your dinner party? You only need one. Dump the rest. Screenshots of memes? Furniture samples? Your parking spot. Time to let all that go.

But before you do, you need to look at Messages for attachments.

MESSAGES AND EMAIL ARE NOT PHOTO LIBRARIES

Messages is NOT a photo library. Nor is email, for that matter. But I see people go to both apps all the time when looking for pictures to share. Something they received or sent recently. But both apps are terrible filing systems and time sucks. Large attachments can get buried and take up precious space without you knowing it.

Your new strategy is that when you get a new attachment - grandchild’s first steps, kids at Disneyland, your besties’ funny cat - you either save it to Apple Photos immediately or you delete it. Once in Apple Photos you can easily find it in Recently Saved, Recently Viewed, by date, or object recognition, to name a few. Once you get in that habit, you’ll keep from overloading your storage and you’ll find photos much faster.

But what about the years of attachment backlogs. A handy tool for this is the Review Large Attachments tab back in the iPhone Storage panel. Remaining Messages attachments are listed by size for easy deletion.

You can also go into Messages itself and find a conversation that you know included lots of attachments. When you tap the sender’s name at the top of the screen you can see every attachment from that conversation. Then you save the keepers and delete the rest. Note that you may want to run a duplicate sweep again afterwards in case you re-saved a photo.

The point is that your Apple Photos Library is designed to catalog and manage your pictures better than anything else. You may feel that dumping everything into one large basket just complicates the finding process, but it’s really the reverse. Getting your pictures all in one place not only saves you from wasting time searching in multiple places, it helps you lighten the load by clarifying what pictures are worth keeping at all.

Which gets us to curating.

CURATING

Curating is the payoff for all the de-duping and de-cluttering you’ve done. This is where you create the visual stories you enjoy and share. Strictly speaking, curating doesn’t gain you more storage space; it’s about sequencing and featuring your best photos. But in the world of every day iPhone photography, curating exposes photo stories that don’t need to live in our active library.

If you’ve done a home remodel or recorded some sequence of a project, you may want to keep those photos as a visual record, but don’t want them to pop up in a Memory video or a search on your home address. Maybe keeping before and after shots is fine, or maybe you don’t want the pictures to show at all. Curating your Photos Library will help you see which stories/photos are personal, which should be saved elsewhere, and, yes, which ones can be dumped altogether.

Again, iCloud comes to the rescue because we can save extraneous keeper photos to a Folder on iCloud Drive and regain that space on our iPhone. The photos are there to review as needed, but aren’t a part of your curated camera roll.

There’s a mantra that pilot’s follow which says “Altitude is the best insurance.” The more you have, the greater your options for a safe landing.

In the world of tech, storage space is the same thing. The more you have available, the more you can avoid an uncomfortable landing.

If you’d like step-by-step instructions for storage management on your iPhone, check out my How It Works post.

iPhone Storage Video