How to Manage your storage

1 Find the right settings

Go to Settings > General and tap either iPhone Storage or iPad Storage a little way down the page. Give the next page a while to populate; depending on your device’s capacity and contents, it can take a while to complete.

2 An overview of usage

At the top you’ll see a colour-coded chart that provides an at-a-glance summary of the types of things that are taking up space, such as apps and media. This helps you work out where you might save space.

3 Recommendations

Before you dive in to delete anything, check whether there’s a Recommendations section just below the chart. What appears there, if anything, depends on your current choices elsewhere in Settings.

4 Accept a change

A short description is given of what each item will change about your device’s behaviour. You may want to look up additional details at support.apple.com. Tap Enable at the top right of a suggestion to act on it.

5 Offload unused apps

This recommendation shows how much space you’ll save by accepting it. If your device later needs room to do something, it’ll remove apps you’re unlikely to use to accommodate it, but retain their data on your device.

6 Manually manage apps

You needn’t entrust iOS with decisions about which apps are offloaded; lower down the page, each installed app is listed with the space it and its data collectively take up, and, new in iOS 11, the date you last used it.

7 Offload a single app

Tap an app in the list and its summary gives you a choice of offloading it, to free up the amount listed next to App Size, or deleting all traces of the app and its data from your device – see the tip to the right, though.

8 Restoring an app

When an app is offloaded, its icon stays on the Home screen and shows up in search results. You can tap it in these places, or tap Reinstall App in its storage management summary, to redownload and continue using it.