Thousands of photos, voice messages, gifs – and now WhatsApp takes up half the phone’s memory. It is especially critical if all your free space is full of personal files that cannot be deleted. How to clean memory from WhatsApp files and tails on Android?
Cleaning through whatsapp itself
WhatsApp automatically downloads all media files by default. This means that pictures, music, animations and more are automatically stored in the smartphone’s memory. On the one hand, this allows you to access content even offline. On the other hand, a lot of unnecessary files litter valuable space.
If you need to save the files you need before deleting them, transfer them manually through Explorer to the memory card. To do this, in the internal memory, follow the path WhatsApp –> Media. Here, audio, documents, pictures, videos and voice messages will be divided into separate folders with the corresponding names in English. Mark the one you want and copy to the memory card.
Once all important information has been transferred, you can start cleaning:
- On the main screen of Whatsapp, in the upper right, click on the image with three dots. Select the “Settings” section.
- Go to the “Data and storage” menu item. Next – in the sub-item “Storage”. Here you can also see how much these applications occupy.
- In the list you will see all the users with whom you have ever corresponded. The interface allows you to delete data for each individual contact. To do this, click on it and click on the “Free up space” button at the bottom. Then you can choose what exactly will be deleted and how much memory each category takes.
- Thus, you can erase all media files, but at the same time leave correspondence with a specific person. It remains only to confirm the action.
All previously saved files will be completely deleted from the memory, so you will not find them in the WhatsApp folder on the system memory. This method will help clear the memory of excess garbage.
Radical content cleansing
If you have hundreds of contacts, and you don’t have the time or desire to manually clean each one, you can delete all data through the application menu on your smartphone. The disadvantage of this method is that it also deletes all information about the account. You will have to re-verify the number, come up with a name, put an avatar and so on. If this is not a problem for you, then follow a few simple steps:
- Go to your phone settings and find the “All apps” section or similar.
- Select WhatsApp from the list and click on “Clear” or “Delete data” depending on the version of Android.
- Confirm the deletion.
Remember that this method completely rolls back the application, so you will have to go through the authorization again.
Get rid of the problem once and for all
If you don’t want to regularly clean your smartphone’s memory from various media content saved in WhatsApp, then just turn off automatic downloads. You can also do this through the standard application interface:
- Go to the application settings through the ellipsis icon and go to the “Data and storage” section.
- In the “Startupload” section, disable downloading files via the mobile network, Wi-Fi and roaming. To do this, in each item you need to uncheck all the checkboxes, as shown in the image below.
After that, WhatsApp will not save audio, photos, videos and documents to the phone memory. However, the correspondence will have to be deleted on its own if it starts to take up too much space.
Please note that it is not possible to redirect saved content to a memory card. The developers say that the problem is in the limitations of the Android OS, so by default folders with media from WhatsApp will always be created on the built-in memory of the gadget. You can either clean them up or completely disable file uploads.
