These 5 File Types Are Using up All of Your Phone’s Memory

Your phone’s memory is always at a premium. Before you know it, your phone is out of space, and you’re out of luck. Two of the biggest “thieves” on your device are your junk files and cache files that add up over time. These files aren’t necessary to your phone’s operation — your phone just makes these files whenever you navigate to websites. Clear out these pesky file-sucks by using Quick Cleanup feature. Click here to clear out these unnecessary files to make more room on your phone:

But as we all know, sometimes clearing out your cache and junk files still doesn’t make enough room. If you have a lot of the following file types on your phone, you might want to consider clearing off a few to make more space.

Read More: Why Your HDR Photos Take Up So Much Space

Video Files: .avi

.avi video files take up a lot of space and memory on your phone. Because they take up so much memory, a lot of video services like Netflix and Amazon only let you stream video. Because they take up so much space, you want to make sure you’re saving the videos you do keep on your phone in a space-saving format, including WMV, QuickTime, RealVideo, or MPEG-1. One of these formats should help you create watchable video that doesn’t eat up all your memory.

Music Files: FLAC

Many people save lots of music to their devices, but FLAC music files in particular take up a lot of space because the file has to be able to be saved on your hard drive but also be playable. To save space on your music files, be sure to only store MP3, MPEG, .m4a, .m4b, and .m4p files on your phone.     

Image Files: .PSD and RAW

Image files saved in .PSD and RAW take up so much space on devices mostly because people collect so many photos. High-quality photo files take up the most space on your device. The more dots per inch (DPI) — an indicator of photo clarity — in a photo, the more space it takes up. To save space on your saved photos, be sure to save them as TIFFs, JPEGs, JPGs, or GIFs.

If you find that you’re constantly running out of space, your first step is to run Quick Cleanup to see if junk and cache files are taking up more space than they’re worth. But if that doesn’t work, try converting your big files to more efficient file types or deleting some of these files entirely.