It's all but inevitable. The time will come when all of those photos, all of those apps and your growing music collection take their toll on your Samsung Galaxy S4. All of the free space you once had has now been gobbled up. What can you do? Thankfully you can get back on track very easily and claim back valuable megabytes, even gigabytes. Here's how to free up storage on the Galaxy S4 to make more room and improve performance.
There are two side effects to freeing up space. Not only will it give you more breathing room to install new apps and store more photos, but you should also find that it helps to improve performance. If your Galaxy 4 is filled to bursting, you will find that your phone acts rather sluggishly. Read on to find out how to free up storage on the Galaxy S4 and earn yourself a speed boost into the bargain.
Remove unused apps
This is probably the quickest and easiest way to free up space, and you might be surprised to discover just how much space some apps occupy. Be ruthless! You probably have all sorts of apps and games installed that you've tried out and not got round to uninstalling even though you've only used them once.
Head to Settings > More > Application manager and take a browse through the list. In this alphabetical list you can see how much space each app is taking up, and the bar at the bottom of the screen lets you keep an eye on the overall amount of free space you have. Just tap any app you no longer need and then hit Uninstall. Work your way through the list and repeat the process for other apps you don’t use any more.
Clear caches
While you're looking at the list of apps you have installed, there's something else you can do to free up space. Many of the apps you have decided to keep installed take up more pace than you might first expect by storing data in a cache. These can quickly expand to hundreds of megabytes, and when you have a large number of apps installed, it's easy to see how all of your free space could disappear.
Tap Settings > More > Application manager and tap each of the listed apps in turn. In the Cache section you will be able to see just how much extra space the app is taking up. Claim back this space by simply tapping the Clear cache button. You can also use the Clear data button to free up more space, but this will completely reset an app to the state it was in when you first installed it.
Delete music and photos
It's not just apps that filled up your storage. If you listen to music on your phone, you've probably given up a good deal of space to store your favorite tracks. And if you're a fan of photography you'll know that it's very easy to fire off a huge number of high resolution photos and quickly gobble up lots of space.
While it can be hard to delete photographs, open up the Gallery app and browse through the various albums. You'll almost certainly be able to track down a few shots that didn’t turn out quite as planned – perhaps you hit the shoot button too early, or maybe your hand moved mid-shot. In gallery view you can switch to file selection mode by tapping and holding on the first image you would like to delete. You can then select any other images (or videos) you would like to delete and tap the recycle bin button at the top of the screen to get rid of them. Similarly, you can open up the Music app and delete any albums or individual tracks you no longer need.
Use a MicroSD card
A great way to gain more storage is to add a MicroSD card to your Galaxy S4. To install it you just need to pop off the rear of the case and you'll find the MicroSD slot next to the SIM port. Once installed you can store all manner of files to your new card, but it's also possible to move apps you already have installed onto it to help free up space without actually having to get rid of anything.
When you've added a memory card, go to Settings > More > Application manager and locate an app. Tap it and then tap the Move to SD card button. You can repeat the process for as many apps as you like, but it is worth bearing in mind that this will affect the performance of some apps – you can always move a particular app back to phone storage if it proves to be problematic. The move option will not be available for all apps.
Downloaded and miscellaneous files
As you browse the web it's very easy to download PDFs and other files that you look at once and then never need again. It's worth taking a look in your Downloads folder to see if you have anything you could get rid of.
Go to Settings > More > Storage and tap the Downloads section. If there's anything here you know you can live without, simply remove it to claim back the space.
Using all of these tips, you might well be surprised at how much space you can free up.
Were you able to free up a lot of space? Did you notice an improvement in performance?
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