Are You Always Running Out Of Space On Your Favorite iDevice?

Year in and year out, one of the main gripes against Apple's line of iDevices is that they never seem to get any bigger. And I'm not talking screen size here, folks -- I'm talking storage. While iCloud, still in its infancy, has done much to alleviate our need for ever greater gigs of space, the solution isn't perfect by any means. Not yet, at least. So, until it is, OS X Daily's put together a little list of six tricks to get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Regularly Remove Photos & Video – ... These pictures can easily be 2MB each, and videos quickly approach hundreds of MB, and with several hundred (or thousand) of photos, you’ll quickly eat up storage space. The best thing to do is to regularly transfer photos from the iOS device to a computer and use the computer as a primary backup, and then delete the pictures from the iPad.

Sound advice here. Using Photo Stream to share photographs between iDevices will eat up your storage even faster, so make sure you have a reliable way to regularly dump those awesome snaps and screenshots.

Delete All Music – Keeping [m]usic on the iPhone and iPad in particular is unnecessary, so do yourself a favor and remove all the music... Consider signing up for a service like iTunes Match when on the go, which lets you play music from your iTunes library from anywhere thanks to iCloud. Also, apps like Pandora, SoundCloud, Spotify, Rdio, and others are great ways to stream music to the iPad and iPhone without actually taking up precious storage space on the device.

For folks who, like me, only listen to a handful of classic albums or artists on a regular basis (Spandau Ballet, China Crisis, Japan, Talk Talk, thanks for asking), this is certainly the right thing to do. For everyone else, I disagree with the remise entirely. Keeping music on the iPhone and iPad in particular is absolutely necessary, and constantly streaming your songs anywhere without Wi-Fi -- whether via iCloud or any number of apps -- will eat up your monthly allotment of data before the week is out.

Find Where Storage is Being Used and Clean Up – It’s easy to check how much storage is available in iOS, and the same screen tells you which apps are taking up the most space. If you find a particularly hefty source, consider removing it.

Yep. Or duh. Same difference.

Delete Completed Games & Unused Apps – Some apps are enormous, the popular game Rage HD for example takes up 2GB of space. ... Delete old finished games and unused apps to free up... space for the new.

Another no-brainer. In fact, any time I ever have to actively increase my available storage, this is the method I choose. While pictures and videos might take up a larger amount of space in total, I almost always have more repeat use for my large Camera Roll than some game I've already completed or never play.

Remove Watched Videos – HD video content takes up enormous amounts of space, each file can range from 500MB to several GB! Don’t forget to delete a movie, TV show, or video podcast after you’ve finished watching it.

Pretty much the same as tip four: Delete non-crucial, unlikely-to-be-played-again content from your iDevice as soon as you're finished with it. You can always re-download any apps, games, movies, and shows you own again for free, so plan accordingly.

Prefer Standard Definition Videos – ...[I]f you have an iPhone or non-retina iPad you can prefer standard definition videos over HD and save a lot of storage space. Most people won’t notice the difference on the smaller screen resolutions and non-retina displays anyway.

This is the least obvious tip on here, and it's probably the one you should most take to heart. Of course, to do so, you'll need to sync your iDevice to iTunes, navigate to the "Options" tab, and select "Prefer standard definition videos." That way, any future video downloaded will be in SD instead of HD, and you'll save boatloads of space. Nice. So there you have it. These few simple guidelines should allow you to make the best use possible of your particular iDevice, and they might even save you a cache of cash whenever you decide to upgrade. Who needs a 64 GB iPad, anyway? [Image: www.lifehacker.com]

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