My phone has less than 3 GB of free space left. I deleted several apps and around 10 GB of videos, but the available storage still hasn't increased. In some cases, the storage screen seems to show even more space being used after I delete things. What could be causing this, and how can I actually reclaim the space?
3 Answers
Deleted photos and videos may still be sitting in the device’s Trash or Recently Deleted folder. Empty that folder manually; many phones keep deleted files for about 30 days before removing them permanently.
The storage calculation may simply not have refreshed yet. Give it a few minutes, restart the phone, and check again. Some devices also take a reboot to finish removing app data after an uninstall.
Check whether the files were deleted from the phone itself or only removed from a cloud-photo view. Also look through the storage settings for large app caches, downloads, offline media, and messaging attachments. Clearing unnecessary caches can recover some space, though it usually won’t account for all 10 GB.
I hadn’t checked the deleted-items folder, so that may explain why the videos were still taking up space.