Ways you can Make Photos Consume Less Space on Your iPhone, iPad

Join us in the tutorial about how you can conserve your memory space in your Iphone.
One of the most common complaints with iOS devices is the lack of storage. Many people buy an 8GB or 16GB iPhone or iPad, only to realise that they're quickly running out of space. Although there are a few ways to expand storage on your iOS device, none of those are inexpensive. You can also try to free up space on your iOS device but that method involves removing a lot of stuff from your iPhone or iPad, which you might not want to do.

However, there's one more way to free up space on your iPhone or iPad that you may not have tried - reducing the amount of space used by photos on your device. Almost everyone who owns an iOS device clicks pictures and over time the photo library gets unnecessarily bloated. Each of these photos takes up around 2MB and iOS's default camera app doesn't let you reduce the resolution at which photos are clicked. Here are a few simple tricks that can help you to quickly reduce the size of your photo library and free up space on your iPhone or iPad.

1. Compress photo libraryApple's built in solution is probably the simplest one. It moves all old photos from your iOS device online to iCloud storage. These pictures will be visible in the Photos app, as smaller previews. If you tap on a picture to open it, the app will download it from iCloud, though in some cases it may already have a local copy. The app manages what's stored locally and what's on the cloud on its own, and as long as you are on a fast enough connection, you shouldn't have any problems.
However, this solution may be inconvenient if you have poor Internet connectivity or limited data plans. To turn this on, go to Settings > Photos & Camera on your iPhone or iPad. Now select Optimise iPhone Storage. Apple's iCloud offers just 5GB space for free, but you can get 20GB at $0.99 per month. This should suffice for most people.

2. Cloud storage
The 5GB limit on iCloud is a little inconvenient, and if you don't want to pay any money at all, there other cloud storage options you can use as well. Flickr lets you upload 1TB of photos and videos for free. It automatically uploads photos and these are by default visible only to you, but you can also easily change their privacy settings or share without re-downloading them. 

Google Photos is also a great alternative as it doesn't limit how many photos you can back up. Yes, the service offers unlimited storage but there is a catch. Google automatically compresses photos you upload but says that these photos are "near-visually identical but take lot less storage". If you are a serious photographer, you should use Flickr. For most people, Google Photos will do the job just fine. Both services are excellent and you can't go wrong with either.

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3. Workflow
Workflow is an excellent automation app for iOS. One of the many things it lets you do is resize photos. Our detailed review of Workflow tells you how to use this app. Once you've downloaded the app, get a workflow that lets you resize images. You can add it to your home screen by tapping the share icon to make it easily accessible. When you run this workflow, you can select all the images from your photo library and then set a resolution (we chose 640x480) to reduce the size of photos.

The workflow will save these images to your photo library. Then you can remove the originals from your iOS device to save space. Of course, this means that the originals are gone for good, but if you're only sharing photos on social networks, the resized images are quite suitable.

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4. Other apps
There are a host of other free apps that let you resize images so they occupy less space. The problem with all the free apps is that they let you resize one photo at a time. This can be cumbersome so if you're willing to shell out Rs. 60, then Shrink My Pictures is an app that lets you do a batch resize. Shrink My Pictures has a simplistic interface but it gets the job done. You can pick a whole bunch of photos and resize them quickly. Then you can delete or move the original photos.

If you're better off with the free alternatives, then you might want to try one of Minima, Resize Image, and Simple Resize.