Many are wondering if It is really necessary to empty the WhatsApp “trash” every month or if it is yet another click-bait headline that some online newspapers use to attract the attention of their readers. Let’s immediately clarify the issue by saying that doing a little cleaning on your smartphone never hurts. If you have a cell phone that has a rather modest amount of memory, then 64GB or lessthe operation could be particularly useful to avoid having to deal with a phone that, due to limited space, becomes terribly slow. In this study we will explain in more detail what it consists of emptying the “trash” in WhatsApp, who should do it and, of course, also how to run it safely on Android and iPhone.
Why emptying WhatsApp trash is necessary
WhatsApp tends to take up more and more memory, especially if we are part of particularly active groups or often exchange videos and voice messages with our contacts. Multimedia files are “heavier” than text, and require more megabytes or gigabytes to store. If you leave thesetting that automatically downloads media received in chat on your device, photos and videos received from other contacts will clog up your smartphone’s internal storage space over time, especially if you have a device with an already rather limited amount of starting memory (to be clear, from 64GB or less). If the available storage decreases to the point that very few GB are left free, the device may begin to suffer from slowdowns and lag quite obvious.
It is for this reason that many users are interested in emptying the WhatsApp “trash”. Before we explain how to do this, let us clarify one thing: in reality, WhatsApp does not have any hidden trash can. The famous Meta messaging app, in fact, has an easily available feature called Manage spacewhich guides the user in deleting files saved on the device that have been received in WhatsApp and are taking up space. It will be this function that we will focus on in this in-depth analysis.
How to delete messages and media to free up space on WhatsApp
Before free up space occupied by WhatsApp mediawe suggest you make a backup. What is it about? A copy of the data that can be saved on cloud services, such as Google Drive or iCloud, and serves to protect the contents of chats from inadvertent deletion. If you don’t know how to backup WhatsApp, help yourself with the instructions we have provided in our dedicated article. Once this is done, you can finally use the internal tool called “Manage Space”.
Android
On Androidto manage WhatsApp files, we open the app, go to the tab Chatwe touch the three dots at the top right and follow the path SettingsThen Storage and dataTherefore Manage space. At this point we see the list of chats sorted by size. Let’s get into it the heaviest onewe select individual elements with a long touch, or we use the total selection if we want to delete everything. We press the icon dustbin and we choose if remove important elements or only duplicate copies. By confirming the operation, the files are deleted from the phone’s memory, without affecting the text messages.
For those who use Android there is also an alternative method via file manager, such as Files by Google. We can manually navigate the route Android > media > com.whatsapp > WhatsApp > Media. Here we find subfolders with images, videos, audio and documents, including copies that sometimes remain even after deletion from chats. By holding down the files we can delete them directly. It is advisable to sort files by size, so as to identify the largest and least useful ones first.
iPhone
On iPhone the logic is identical to what we have already seen for the first method that we illustrated in the section dedicated to Android. Also in this case we open the WhatsApp app, tap Settings bottom right, then Space and data and finally Manage space. Here too we find the chats sorted by weight. Let’s get into it conversation that takes up more memorylet’s touch Selectwe choose i files to delete or there we select everyone and we use the icon of dustbin to confirm. If we also want to remove the duplicateswe choose the dedicated option.
How many months should you clean the app
But let’s now come to the question we introduced ourselves with and clarify it once and for all every how many months to clean WhatsApp. The answer is… Depends. What does it depend on? From your device, in this case from storage space available at the start and, secondly, from flow of information you receive on WhatsApp. Just to give an example, if you have a device with little memory (64 or even 32GB), on which many apps are installed and through which you exchange numerous photos and videos, you will probably have to carry out the aforementioned cleaning operations more frequently. Otherwise, you could reduce this “maintenance” activity over time.
