It is honestly baffling that WhatsApp doesn’t seek consent during its initial setup regarding auto-downloads. By default, the app saves almost everything to your phone storage, regardless of whether you actually view the content. After weeks of manually deleting massive amounts of clutter, I finally took control. Here is how I stopped WhatsApp from hijacking my device’s storage.
Stop WhatsApp from Automatically Downloading Specific Media
WhatsApp downloads everything as soon as it arrives, even if you don’t open the message. It does that to ensure media is immediately available to view on arrival, but it also means WhatsApp will download videos/photos that you may not even want to see.
Thankfully, you can disable this behavior in WhatsApp Settings. To do so, open WhatsApp Settings and tap on Storage and Data. Here, under the Media auto-download section, you can separately select file types to download when using mobile data, Wi-Fi, and roaming.
You should definitely disable Videos here, as they consume the most phone storage. You can enable/disable the rest of the media types depending on your specific needs. I disabled videos, audio (voice notes are excluded), and documents. I receive and interact with pictures often, so I allowed it to auto-download.
Enable Disappearing Messages for High-Volume Groups/Chats
If you are in a very active group or have a contact who likes to bombard you with funny memes, you should enable disappearing messages for them specifically. This lets you view the latest content, and it just deletes itself on its own later when you don’t need it anyway.
Just open the high-volume group/chat, tap on the dots menu, and select Disappearing messages. Now, select a timer after which all messages will be deleted. I use 7 days option as it’s enough to view content at my own pace. You can also select 24 hours or 90 days, depending on your needs.
If you don’t want specific content to be deleted after the selected timer, open it and tap on the Save button at the top to download it permanently.
Delete Specific Media from Chats
WhatsApp’s built-in storage manager shows you all the chats sorted by the size of media they have sent. It’s easy to just select the chat here and outright delete it, but I often can’t do that if the chat has important messages that I may need later. So what I do instead is clear the chat, but only delete the type of media that is taking up a lot of space, and I have no use for it. Here’s how:
Tap and hold on a chat to select it (you can select multiple) and then choose the Clear chats option from the dots menu. Here, you can either delete all messages or media files only. Select media files, and you’ll be given the option to select exactly what type of media files you want to delete.
This greatly helps with keeping WhatsApp clean, as I am not forced to keep specific media just because I can’t delete all messages, and I don’t have to individually select media to delete in WhatsApp’s storage manager.
Stop Sent Files from Taking Away Phone Storage
You can easily find and delete media you have received, but what about media you have sent? Yes, when you send any media file, WhatsApp creates a duplicate of the file and save in its own folder. You probably won’t need the Sent media since it’s already in your phone, but it will keep eating phone storage, especially if you send HD videos.
While you can find sent media files in WhatsApp storage manager in the respective chats, it’s very difficult to manually find your sent media in each chat and delete them. So for quick cleaning, I just access the WhatsApp folders that store all the sent media and delete them. Here’s how:
Open your file manager app, and move to this location “Internal Storage → Android → media → com.whatsapp → WhatsApp → Media“.
Here, you’ll find multiple media folders, like WhatsApp Video, WhatsApp Images, etc. These folders have a Sent folder inside that contains your sent media of the respective media type. Just delete this Sent folder (WhatsApp will recreate it), and your sent items will be deleted.
Decrease WhatsApp Local Backup File Size
Along with creating a backup in Google Drive, WhatsApp also saves a local backup. If you have lots of active chats, this local backup can be huge. You can decrease the size of back up folder to ensure it takes up less space on your phone. To do that, you can delete old backups and only keep the latest one that matters.
In your phone’s file manager, go to Internal Storage → Android → media → com.whatsapp → WhatsApp → Databases. Here, you can delete all files except for the latest msgstore.db.crypt14 file to ensure old backups don’t take up unnecessary space.
With these methods, I now have to clean up WhatsApp less often as data takes much more time to accumulate, and no hidden data eats up phone storage. If you are low on phone storage and controlling WhatsApp data isn’t enough, try these other methods to free up storage on Android.
