How to get more storage on iPhone

The short version

You can't add storage to an iPhone. There's no memory card slot, and the storage chip is soldered in, so whatever capacity you bought is what you have. That leaves two real options: pay for iCloud storage, or clear space on the phone you've got.

Clearing is free and usually gets you further than people expect, because most of a full iPhone is video and runs of nearly identical photos. Buying is a perfectly good answer once you've done that, and cheaper if you do it in that order.

You can't add storage to an iPhone

An iPhone's storage capacity is fixed when the phone is manufactured. There is no memory card slot, no upgrade service and no setting that changes it, so a 64 GB iPhone is a 64 GB iPhone for the whole life of the phone. Google's own related questions on this search include "How can I increase my iPhone 64GB to 128GB?", which is worth answering plainly: you can't.

Everything sold as "more iPhone storage" is really one of two other things: space on Apple's servers, which is iCloud, or a drive you plug in and copy files to. Neither makes the phone itself hold more.

What a USB drive can and cannot do

You can connect a USB drive or an SD card reader to an iPhone and browse it in the Files app. Apple documents this properly: the drive needs a single data partition formatted as APFS, macOS Extended, exFAT or FAT32, and on a Lightning iPhone you'll need the matching camera adapter (Connect external storage devices to iPhone). A drive that draws more power than the phone can supply needs a powered adapter.

That's genuinely useful for moving big files off the phone. What it doesn't do is extend your photo library. Photos lives in internal storage and iCloud and won't run from a drive, so the phone never treats the drive as more room. It's an archive, not a capacity upgrade.

To move photos onto one: plug it in, open Photos, tap Select and choose what you want, then Share → Save to Files and pick the drive. Check the copies opened properly before you delete anything, because deleting from Photos with iCloud Photos switched on removes them from every device at once.

Pic Prune doesn't recommend particular drives, and everyone who ranks for this question is selling one. Three things decide whether any of them works: the connector matches your phone, the drive is formatted to one of the types above, and it doesn't need more power than the phone can give it.

So it comes down to two options

Buy iCloud storage if your library is genuinely large and genuinely wanted, and you'd rather pay than spend an evening deciding. It starts at 50 GB and it's a monthly subscription. How much iCloud storage costs covers the tiers and, more usefully, how to end up on a smaller one.

Clear space if you suspect a lot of what's in there isn't something you chose to keep. On most personal iPhones that suspicion is right, and this is the option that costs nothing.

The order matters more than the choice. Clearing first can move you under an iCloud tier boundary, and because iCloud bills by tier rather than by the gigabyte, that's the difference between two monthly fees rather than a few gigabytes.

Find out what is using it first

Settings → General → iPhone Storage shows what is actually filling an iPhone, listed by category with the biggest first. Reading it takes a minute and it stops you deleting the wrong things for an hour.

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap General.
3. Tap iPhone Storage and wait for the bar to fill in.

You'll get every category, biggest first. On most personal iPhones, Photos is the largest band by a wide margin, and inside Photos the biggest single item is usually video. If your bar says something else, follow your bar rather than this page.

The free ways, in order

Clearing space on an iPhone costs nothing and usually recovers more than people expect, because most of a full phone is video and runs of nearly identical photos. The steps below are ordered by space recovered against effort, not by how clever they sound.

1. Check Recommended for You first. Settings → your name → iCloud → Recommended for You. Apple added this in iOS 17 and documents it in Manage your iCloud storage and Manage your photo and video storage: it offers to remove photos, large files and old backups you probably no longer need. It is the one part of this job Apple will do for you, and it costs nothing to look. Apple frames it as a low-storage tool, so it may have nothing to suggest if your account is comfortable.
2. Empty Recently Deleted. Photos → Collections → Utilities → Recently Deleted → Select → Delete All. Photos you deleted stay there for 30 days and count against you the whole time, so this is often instant space for no decisions at all.
3. Long videos you forgot about. In Photos, tap Search then Videos and look at the longest. One accidental twenty-minute clip in a pocket is worth hundreds of photographs.
4. Screenshots. Collections → Media Types → Screenshots. Almost none were meant to be kept, and you can clear hundreds in two minutes: how to delete screenshots.
5. Offload apps you don't use. Under iPhone Storage, each app offers Offload App, which removes the app but keeps its data. Safe, and usually smaller than people hope.
6. The runs of nearly identical photos. The biggest pile, and the one nothing can do for you automatically. See below.

Photos, which is usually most of it

Your iPhone has a Duplicates album under Collections → Utilities that merges exact copies for free, and it's the right first move. It only finds files that are byte-for-byte the same image though, which in most libraries is a small slice.

What it leaves behind is the burst of nine from one moment, the fourteen tries at the same photo, the three versions of a group shot where somebody blinked. Every one of those is a genuinely different file, so your phone can't safely pick for you, and they stay. That pile is usually where the space actually is: a duplicate pair wastes one photo, a burst of nine wastes eight.

Clearing them by hand is free and it works. It's also slow, because the job is comparing rather than deleting: tap into one, tap back, tap into the other, try to hold the difference in your head. How to delete duplicate photos on iPhone covers the built-in tool, the free method and what each one actually catches.

Pic Prune groups those near-identical shots on the phone itself, using Apple's Vision framework, so a whole run is compared side by side instead of one photo at a time. It is iPhone only, nothing is deleted unless you choose it, and your photos never leave your phone.

When buying is the right answer

Buying iCloud storage is the right answer once the obvious waste is gone and the library is still bigger than the free allowance. Every Apple account gets 5 GB of iCloud storage free (Apple, iCloud+ plans and pricing), and paying for more is much cheaper than losing photographs. There's no shame in it.

Two things worth knowing before you pick a tier. You can share any paid tier with up to five other people through Family Sharing, 50 GB included, so one plan in a house beats two of them. And Apple never drops your tier for you: if you clear space later, you have to go and change the plan yourself.

If your storage is full right now and you need it working again today, what to do when iCloud storage is full covers what actually stops working and the order to fix it in.