If you have contracted storage space in iCloud and after a few days you have filled it up, you are surely wondering what is happening. That is why, in this post we are going to give you five tricks so that you can save and free up storage space in iCloud, emphasizing those items that take up the most space.
The elements that weigh more in iCloud
The items that usually take up the most space in iCloud storage space are applications, photos and videos, application data, backup copies and, if we have configured a family group, the space used by other people. Regarding this last point, it should be noted that only from the 200GB plan can we share space storage. Neither the free 5GB plan nor the base 50GB plan allow you to share that storage with other people in the same household.
The first thing we are going to see are the applications that use iCloud. When we say that they use the cloud, it is not for their operation, necessarily. Rather, they are going to store their data in the cloud and, if we have many apps allowed for this function, the information will accumulate. That is why keeping track of these is very important. For this reason we will go to Settings > Our name (your Apple ID) > iCloud > Apps that use iCloud > Show all. Here we will have a complete list of all the applications that use the cloud space, and we will be able to deactivate those that do not interest us.
The second trick is to control the space that other people in our family group are using. To do this, within the same section where we were before, we will have to go down to the Family Use category. Here we will see a summary of the people we have added, and we will see the space they are occupying. If we want them to no longer use that family space, we will have to click on the Stop sharing with the family button.
Media content and copies
Photos and videos are what will end up taking up the most space, especially if we take a lot of images and videos, or if they are in a resolution that weighs a lot. Therefore, you have to go to Settings> Camera. This trick to save space consists of modifying the resolution, and therefore, the size of all our photos and videos. For the resolution of the photos we will Settings > Camera > Formats and select High Efficiency. Thus they will be saved in a proprietary format called HEIC that, without losing resolution, takes up less space than JPEG. As for the video, we select the category Record video. Here we will see a list of formats that we can select so that our videos (especially if they are long) take up less space in iCloud.
The last trick affects WhatsApp. Backups of all chats are stored in iCloud. MHowever, we can make these copies take up less space. If we go to WhatsApp > Settings > Chats > Backup, we will see that there is an option called Include videos. If we have it deactivated, the chat videos will not enter that copy and, therefore, they will stop taking up storage space in the cloud.