WhatsApp has two billion active users worldwide. More than 60 million messages are sent every day with the popular messenger. Many of these are photos or videos – and that often takes up a lot of cell phone memory. Here we show you how to avoid this problem with a simple trick.
Whether it’s sharing pictures of our food, exchanging math homework, sending selfies, or just chatting with friends and family. Applications like WhatsApp take up a few gigabytes of storage space with frequent use and long chats. That alone and the normal use of the mobile phone can already push the capacities of a smartphone to its limits without expandable memory.
However, it is often the case that WhatsApp uses more than just the application to store the mobile phone. On the one hand, Messenger saves pictures that were taken and sent in the chat in the smartphone’s photo gallery. On the other hand, photos that you receive also end up in the recordings.
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WhatsApp for iOS: Simple trick saves smartphone storage space
The fact that WhatsApp saves sent and received images not only in the chat itself, but also in the recordings of the smartphone can be easily switched off under iOS. With the following setting you have more storage space available in no time:
- Open WhatsApp on your smartphone
- Then go to the “Settings” tab
- Now select the “Chats” section
- Turn off “Save to Camera Roll”.
Now only the pictures that you took in the chat and then sent are saved in your recordings.
WhatsApp for Android: This is how the messenger doesn’t fill up your smartphone
On Android, unfortunately, you cannot stop WhatsApp from saving the media in the gallery. If you still don’t want to lose track of the picture gallery, you can prevent the photos and videos from being displayed there:
- Open WhatsApp on your smartphone
- Now open the settings here
- In the “Chats” tab you will find the item “Visibility of media”
- Here you can now disable “Show newly downloaded media in your phone’s gallery”.
Now the WhatsApp media is only displayed in the chat.
A notice: In iOS, duplicates of the media are created – in Android, removing the photo from the gallery also deletes it from the chat. It’s just a shortcut on Android – but iOS stores a copy in the photos that remains even if you delete the original WhatsApp.
More exciting WhatsApp tricks
You can find even more tips and tricks about WhatsApp on our practical tips topic page. There you will find out, for example, how you can make group calls on WhatsApp and how you can view the data stored on WhatsApp.
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