Word on the internet is that due to cloud storage being deeply integrated into Windows Phone, storage isn’t a real matter these days. Hardware manufacturers like HTC even go so far to release devices with only 16 GB of build in storage, without any SD card slot available, even though Windows Phone 8 officially supports this now. Nokia doesn’t support SD memory either, but at least their flagship device comes with 32 GB of internal memory.
Update: Check out the Storage Shrinker App for Windows Phone. It helped us getting 5Gb free of the other storage.
Like Nirmal just recently revealed, storage is still an issue, no matter what people are trying to tell you. Well, at least if it comes to Windows Phone, that is. The fact that Windows Phone lacks a true cache management and doesn’t even clearly show what files get cached, by simply hiding the information behind a mysterious “other” inside the device’s capacity information sooner or later leads to storage issues.
One solution, a pretty dramatic one in my eyes, is a hard reset. Not only will you lose progress in all your games and even app settings, it’s very time intensive. Not to mention, that it will not protect you from suffering the same issue again after a while. Fortunately users indeed have at least a little control over the cache, which will of course not solve the issue entirely – this is up to Microsoft – but reduce the amount of wasted space.
Skydrive
The largest issue, which Nirmal already pointed out, is that images, which you’ve uploaded to SkyDrive, are moved to a certain folder on your device that you don’t have access to. It doesn’t even matter if you manually upload the images from within the pictures hub or use WP’s automatic upload feature. They’re transferred to that other folder either way.
I suppose these images are removed after a while, but if you’re not willing to wait for this to finally happen, you can sort of force it.
Just login to your SkyDrive by either using a browser or any dedicated app and move the uploaded files from their current folder to any other. You’ll notice, that you quickly regain the storage space previously occupied by said images.
Editors Note: It seems there WP maintains some information about every image in others. One such example is the message you add when sharing any picture on twitter or Facebook. However if the image is removed from Skydrive Upload folder, it syncs and removes that metadata from the phone also.
Before and after moving previously – automatically – uploaded images to another folder (12 MB of images). I had almost 0.02 GB (20MB Approx.) of space free after that.
Cached Thumbnails:
Images stored on SkyDrive are responsible for a lot of space wasted on your device. All folders you’ve declared as containing photos on SkyDrive automatically appear on your Windows Phone. This isn’t much of an issue, as long as you don’t actually open the according folders from your pictures hub.
As soon as you open these folders though, thumbnails are being downloaded and temporarily stored on your device. If you tap one of these images to see it full screen, it’s downloaded full size. The latter won’t stay long on your device. It seems to be just a matter of 1 or 2 days. Thumbnails though stay a couple more days.
There’s no way you can force to remove them from your device. But you can easily tell when this happened. As soon as the folders don’t show an image in your pictures hub anymore, you can be sure all thumbnails have been removed and the space occupied by them has been set free.
Emails
There are of course loads of other system apps that demand storage space. One that’s completely underestimated is the email application. If you have set your sync options to sync the last 30 days, or even more, and you receive/send a considerable amount of emails in that time, even these few KBs per mail can sum up to a couple of hundred megabytes. Here a couple of suggestions how to reduce the space occupied by your email communications:
- Set sync options to “last 7 days”.
- Only Synchronize folders that you really need
- Both Outlook.com (Hotmail) and Exchange accounts support search on server. So even if you need to find an email that is currently not on your device, you’ll still be able to find it with the server search feature and read it on your phone
Internet Explorer
If you’re an avid browser user like me, the cache files created by the Internet Explorer can quickly eat up huge amounts of your storage space. Especially if you visit graphics/images intense sites. There are two ways to clear things up, but both have their downsides.
Manage Storage:
The first thing you may want to do is to check whether you have allowed websites to store files on your device. If you did so, you can delete files which are no longer needed by going to settings -> Internet Explorer -> Advanced Settings -> manage storage and tick every checkbox of files you want to be removed.
If you don’t want to do this over and over again, just untick the checkbox “Websites are allowed to store files on my device”. You may as well open your Internet Explorer and access these settings from there. However, unchecking said setting results in slightly longer loading times for affected websites, as whatever files had previously been stored have to be downloaded again.
Browser Cache:
Next stop: browser cache. You should regularly clear your browser history, as it manages all your cached image files. You’ll be surprised by the amount of storage freed after performing that clean up. The downside is, that you will not only lose all cached images, but also stored passwords and cookies. Well, I rather enter all information again than having my IE take up heaps of my available memory.
Office Hub
This could as well have been filed under email, but I thought it deserved a separate mention. If you open any kind of document, be it doc, xls, pps or even pdf, from an email attachment, it is stored on your device. You would naturally look these up in the phone section of the Office Hub, but that’s not where they go. They’re – obviously – stored under email in the Office Hub. Tap and hold each document you want to remove and choose “delete from phone”.
Music and Video Hub history
Let’s be honest, this last step can easily be skipped, as no matter how huge your history is, it doesn’t waste much space. But if you still want to remove it, you can use WP Tools to do so. Grab it from here.
Conclusion:
That’s pretty much all you can do. Everything else is controlled by the OS itself. Microsoft definitely needs to add options to clear the cache manually. Let us know how your experience was and if these things actually helped you in someway. We are eager to listen.
Excellent. Thanks for this article. Now lets hope that Microsoft will address the issue.
I had to reset my Lumia 920 after it ballooned to over 12GB!
Its funny to see how image is taking up so much space and why MS never knew about it. Lets home some cache management thing shows up in 8.5
Thanks for the tips, I never thought I would have storage issue with my 8GB lumia820 before, but after a while, The other section now reach 3 GB, leaving only 700 MB free space on device, scary..
An incredibly informative article Mark,
IE Cache turned out to be 200MB for me. Still waiting to see more space happening.
My windows phone is use less till microsoft releases an updat5e to solve this or if apps can be installed on microSD card
I switched to a Blackberry Z10 in the meantime after having only 500mb free in my Lumia 920… the “other” folder has close to 8GB…
I try using the shrink storage app but its not helping
When I have low memory I play a Long Video on youtube it cleared the cache automatically and gave me some 500 mb on My Omnia W. Let me know if it works for others
That’s what happens when you go on low memory. It always clears the other storage files.
1.How to open documents in SD card?
2.Which app will scan a visiting card and convert it in ti a contact in lumia 820?
Did all those steps n still have 7gb in the other section… What can I do?
My HTC 8S has been rendered essentially useless. I have deleted every app that I possible can, taken all the above mentioned steps, moved all the files I can to my SD card and my Other storage remains resolutely at 1.54GB. This leaves my free space at 26.23MB. The software update is telling me to find 406MB so it can download the latest update. I think it is having a laugh. I presume my only option is a hard reset?
same issue on my lumia 720. The Other storage is 1.9 g and no way i can get rid of this
My Other storage have 1.13 GB, that is normal or not?. I don’t what kind of file in Other storage. My phone lumia 520
Well written, well documented. I was on the point of returning my HTC 8S, after upgrading from HTC Radar.
I will try all stuff in the weekend
I have 7.34Gb used out of 7.41Gb and nearly 5Gb of that is in Other with less than 100Mb of storage remaining on my Lumia 820 which kept telling me that my available storage was low and that I should go to Settings. But I had already set both settings to use the SD card so I was helpless. I have done what these articles suggest and I have found an extra 40Mb or so but it is very unhelpful especially as I have 32Gb of SD storage hardly used. Because the storage is so tight everything is sluggish with the phone taking seconds to respond and sometimes freezing. How does Microsoft get these things so wrong?
What use is a category called Other? Especially when it’s the largest single category?
What use is a message telling you that storage is low and you should check settings when there is nothing you can do about it if and when you do?
Hey Brian, Strongly Suggest you to go here http://betalabs.nokia.com/trials/Storage-Check and install it on your 820. This will definitely clear up some space. You will have signup with them to get the QR code or download link.
my 920 still shows skydrive folders that have been long deleted! It always reports an issue fetching the pix and even suggests I may be viewing someone elses folder with incorrect privilledges (I am Not). Any idea why these folders are still showing in the picture hub?
Hey Rus, Can you just signout from your Skydrive and sign in again and then check if that’s happening again.
Hi Ashish.
I have logged out and into skydrive several times on my desktop pc but cannot find a way to do this on my WP8 Lumia 920?
The errant folder(s) are still showing on my phone!
This isn’t just a WP issue. I had to routinely reset my iPhone (when I had one) to clear ‘Other Storage’. If WP back up were as good as apples with placing tiles on the start screen then none of us would have any issue every so often just doing a hard reset/restore
Thanks for your suggestion Ashish, the storage check gives a better overvieuw over the storage in my lumia 820. Regrettably however, it does not help me to claen up ay junk from my phone’s memory so the problem stays. Is there any chance that Microsoft provides us with a final solution?
Thanks again,
Reset
Itts 2015 now and this issue is still not adressed from MS, thats just sad.