How to delete unnecessary and hidden WhatsApp media on your phone
WhatsApp is a convenient way to interact with friends and family, thanks to built-in calling and texting features, as well as the ability to send voice messages, videos, and photos across devices. The app works onthe best Android devicesand iPhones and can beinstalled on a desktop or laptop. With added simplicity, it’s tempting to send and receive countless images and videos, which take up space on your phone. While you may delete media conversation by conversation, this isn’t straightforward, as you need to go through every discussion on your phone.
There’s another way to access your media gallery and hidden folders on your phone to get rid of unwanted media. And, if you use WhatsApp on your computer, there’s a way to clean up the data it stores locally. Here’s how to clean it all up.
Removing received media from your phone’s gallery
Unless you’ve changed your WhatsApp settings, the media you receive from other people is automatically saved in your phone’s gallery under the WhatsApp folder. It’s easy to access it and clean it up.
Accessing hidden media
Depending on your WhatsApp settings, not all media you receive is saved in your phone’s gallery. This doesn’t mean the photos and videos aren’t saved on your phone. It means they’re hidden and not easily accessible. For instance, WhatsApp doesn’t make media from archived conversations visible in your device’s gallery but instead saves them in hidden folders.
Here’s how to access your WhatsApp media, including hidden photos and videos:
Clearing your cache
Although clearing your WhatsApp cache won’t remove the media, it helps the app run smoothly and deletes temporary files from your phone’s memory.
Free up space on your computer
Since WhatsApp can be installed on your computer, it saves files locally, which takes up space on your device. These files aren’t easily accessible on your Mac or PC and are automatically cleared after a while unless you manually download them. Still, when you need to free up space on your computer, deleting WhatsApp media might help.
The easiest way to remove these files is by logging out of WhatsApp if you’re using the desktop app. It only takes a few clicks:
This unlinks your computer from your WhatsApp account and removes the media stored on it. Next time you log in, the app restores your chats and doesn’t retrieve the media it had cached before the process.
Alternatively, you can uninstall the app if you don’t need it, which also removes the data it stored locally on your computer.
Free up plenty of storage space
The main reason to clean up your WhatsApp media, especially from hidden folders since their content is not visible in your phone’s gallery, is the ability to get rid of useless files that take up space on your phone. Even though WhatsApp compresses images, backups contain these images and videos. Using Google Drive to sync your backups takes up space on the cloud for data you don’t need or want to keep. If you decide to switch, these useless files will be restored on a new device, meaning they’ll take up space on your new handset.
It’s useful to manually remove these files once in a while to free up space on your current device and make your backups lighter and faster. A bonus to removing these files is looking through old memories and putting a smile on your face. If you don’t care much about them, you’re able to delete the folders from the get-go without going through them one by one.
To make the most out of your WhatsApp experience, check out ourWhatsApp tips and tricksand take complete control of what you do with the app.
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