Digital Spring Cleaning Tips and Apps

Digital Spring Cleaning Tips!

28 Mar , 2016

Around this time of year, I find myself doing a little spring cleaning around the house. And while I love a clean kitchen, it is easy to forget about straightening up space on your phone! That’s right, it’s time to say “keep it or delete it” with a couple tips and apps that will help you tidy up your tech.

Drowning in Apps: Get this, a recent mobile phone research study shows that most users spend 85% of their phone time using only 5 apps. WOW! This is hard for me to believe, because I have pages and pages of apps! But, even if you are slightly above average here, the fact remains that it is probably time to go through and clear out the apps that you never use. This will free up a huge amount of storage for important stuff like music and pictures!

There are two ways to delete apps on the iPhone. The first and most popular is to tap and hold an icon until all your icons start shaking. Then, an X icon in the top left corner of each app will appear. These are the ones you can delete. Remember that Apple has some default apps that won’t show that X icon. Sorry, Charlie, you can’t delete those from your phone.

I prefer an alternate way of deleting apps- through the Settings App. I mainly prefer this because it lets me see which apps take up the most space on my phone and decide if they are worth the space. Plus, it kinda makes me sad to see my poor little apps shaking like they are scared I am going to delete them! Haha. Simply tap Settings and then General > Usage> Manage Storage. Here you can see which apps take up the most space and delete them by tapping in them and then tapping delete.

Now that you’ve got your apps under control, let’s move on to Step 2. If you are anything like me, you may have noticed your “Photos” app is taking up the most space on your phone! Mine takes up over 60% of my app usage! Buy, obviously, I am not going to delete my Photos app!

With the Photo Clearer app (very original name, I know) you can quickly select photos and videos you want to delete and have them fully deleted- not just sent to the “Recently Deleted” folder. To aid this process, the app lets you sort by size and date of file. You can even search to see what photos have duplicates and delete those as well. When you’ve cleared out all the junk, you are left with just the highlight memories and good selfies! This app also allows you to select these photos that you want to keep on your phone and compress them, so they take up even less storage!

I have to give an honorable mention shout out to an app I have shared in the past! Unroll.me will help you clean out your mailbox and finish the digital spring cleaning trifecta!