Channel your anger at big tech into a cloud storage saving session

You have to pay for cloud storage because all your attention and self-worth is stuck inside a glass rectangle that's not allowed to touch water.

Years of evidence you were there, with those people, at that time, looking stylish, sexy, artsy, rich, or happy. It could all be destroyed the second you drop your phone down a drain.

Big tech knows how we feel about our photos, they convince us to take more of them, they make them hard to optimise and delete, they push updates that use more storage, and then they charge us rent on the fear that we'll lose them all. They may even be responsible for all the storm drains having perfectly phone sized holes in them.

Downgrading your cloud storage will probably save you between $2 or $7 a month. If you're on the highest iCloud tier it could save you $30 a month.

You may feel these numbers aren't quite worth the hassle — and that's exactly how companies want you to feel about all your subscriptions, utilities, and everything else that chips away at your savings.

If having small amounts of your hard earned money extracted at regular intervals makes you mildly angry. Channel that anger into a cloud storage saving session.

Cloud storage tier systems

Cloud storage providers use tiered subscriptions. Once you go over the threshold of one tier you need to upgrade to a new tier.

If you're only on the cusp of one tier, it is trivial to save data and pay much less for the lower tier.

For instance Apple's iCloud tiers jump from 200GB for $2.99 a month to 2TB of storage for $9.99 a month. If you were using 210GB of cloud storage you can easily save $7 a month by making some small adjustments.

Tips for reducing your iCloud storage

These tips are written with Apple products in mind – because that's what I have. I suspect most of them will be applicable to other platforms too.

Photos and Videos

For most people the biggest use of cloud storage is photos and videos, so we'll start there.

While I believe my introductory rant remains mostly true, there are a few useful features built into the Apple Photos app that help reduce some storage.

We'll start with some easy wins.

Remove duplicates

The photos app has a feature called duplicates which allows you to delete all the duplicate photos in your library in one go.

1. Open Photos on iOS.
2. Tap Collections
3. Scroll down to Utilities
4. Tap Duplicates
5. Tap Select
6. Tap Select All
7. Tap Merge
8. A dialogue might open with options and details about the merge.

Delete screen recordings and screenshots

Photos has folders where it automatically adds screenshots, screen recordings. These are probably not precious memories.

1. Open Photos
2. Tap Collections
3. Scroll down to Media Types
4. Tap Screenshots or Screen Recordings (if you don't have any screenshots or screen recordings these folders will be hidden)
5. Tap Select
6. Tap Select All
7. Now that they're all selected, you can deselect any you want to keep.
8. Tap the bin icon
9. Tap Delete

Delete QR codes, receipts, and documents.

This follows the same procedure as screen recordings and screenshots. In this case you may need to be careful as these items are occasionally important. In my experience photos of documents are usually only needed once.

1. Open Photos
2. Tap Collections
3. Scroll down to Utilities
4. Tap QR Codes, Receipts or Documents
5. Tap Select
6. Tap Select All
7. Now that they're all selected, you can deselect any you want to keep.
8. Tap the bin icon
9. Tap `Delete

Delete photos of specific searchable items

On iPhone you can search for the contents of photos and videos. For example, you can search for the phrase "book" and it will show you all the pictures you've taken of books.

I seem to take a lot of photos of books that I have thought about reading. So I deleted all the books I took photos.

You might find you take similar photos that were never intended to keep forever.

Here's some other searches you might find useful: "car", "parking", "sign", "ticket", "ex boyfriend."

A particularly useful one is "darkness" which will show any photo you took in the dark. Often these are highly delete-able.

Keep only one photo from each batch

It's very common to take multiple photos in quick succession to capture a moment or to ensure a subject pretends to be sufficiently happy.

While taking photos we don't usually stop to delete the bad ones. But keeping all of the photos taken in one batch makes it harder to skim through and find the good ones later.

There is no quick and easy way of deleting all but one photo in a batch on the Apple Photos app. You just have to go through all your photos, find groups that look the same, and delete them manually.

This could take a long time — but I have a tip that might make it easier.

Filter by "not in album" and sort your photos into albums at the same time.

You can filter your photo library to only show photos and videos that haven't yet been put into an album.

Photos you've already put in an album are likely to be keepers. So you have fewer photos to sort through.

This also means you can sort the photos you want to keep into albums — then the leftover photos from each batch are photos you can safely delete.

Remove video from live photos

In 2015 Apple introduced Live Photos. When you take a photo with Live Photos enabled your phone will also take a short video.

As far as I can tell this is just meant to be fun, and I suppose it is a little bit fun, but we're not here to have fun, we're here to save $2 a month.

The additional video attached to a live photo uses additional memory. On my phone I had around 1600 live photos simply because live photos was enabled and I didn't really care at the time.

There is no built in way to remove the video portion of live photos, but I made a way just for you.

I created a shortcut for Apple Shortcuts which will create static images from your live photos and then delete the original. It will even keep all the metadata and tell you how much data you've saved.

Delete old messages

I suspect most people will not be willing to do this one as there's something that just feel wrong about deleting messages. If you don't think you need to keep every message you've sent or received for the last decade you change the settings so your phone only stores one year of messages.

1. Open Settings
2. Tap your profile at the top.
3. Navigate to iCloud
4. Under the heading Saved to iCloud tap Messages
5. Tap Keep Messages
6. Select 1 Year

Delete iCloud data for unused apps

Before getting to the difficult stuff. The easiest way of reducing your cloud data is by removing the data for apps you don't care about or no longer use.

You may even have cloud data used by apps you have long forgotten about. I just found out Angry Birds Reloaded was using 300 kilobytes.

1. Open Settings
2. Tap your profile at the top of the settings menu. The button that says your name and the words Apple Account, iCloud+, and more
3. Navigate to iCloud
4. Tap Storage
5. This page has a list of apps and the data they use. For each app that no longer needs cloud storage, tap the name of the app.
6. A new page will load showing information about the app's cloud storage usage. To delete it, tap Delete Data from iCloud.

Tags

• saving money
• saving data
• saving data

Published

16 Mar 2026

Updated

16 Mar 2026