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How to delete whatsapp media


How to delete unwanted WhatsApp media from your Android phone

There are perks and downsides to using WhatsApp, the world’s most widely used messaging app. An upside is that your contacts are more likely to be on WhatsApp, but at the same time, you also have to put up with those obnoxious good morning messages, expendable memes, and all sorts of unnecessary stuff that, once downloaded, will sit in your phone for eternity. But that growing pile can be particularly concerning on phones with limited internal storage, and with expandable memory becoming rare, it can be a challenge. Handling all the WhatsApp media and files running into several GBs can be a big and tedious task for sure, but here's our guide for cleaning WhatsApp photos, videos, files, and other stuff from your phone.

Use the WhatsApp’s built-in storage tool

With WhatsApp, it's easy to identify chats using a lot of storage and may slow down your phone. Using the storage manager, you can easily sort the files by size and delete the ones you don’t need anymore or have already backed up. Here’s how you can get there:

  1. In the main Chats tab, go to Settings by tapping the vertical ellipses icon at the top.
  2. Head to Storage and data and select the first option that says Manage storage. There you’ll see the break-up of the storage WhatsApp is using, along with some suggestions and a list of chats sorted by size.
  3. Go into Larger than 5MB to glance at the files taking up the most storage across all chats, or tap on the first chat to reveal all the files you’ve received from that contact. They are sorted by size by default, but you can change that order from the hamburger menu at the top.
  4. Now you just have to select the media and files you don’t want anymore and hit the delete button. Removing a file from here also wipes it from your phone storage unless you’ve made another copy of it outside the default WhatsApp folder.
  5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 with as many chats as required to reclaim most of the storage space.

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There’s a good chance you only have a few (or single) contacts or groups that send a lot of junk. Instead of going the long way, you can simply get rid of their stuff from their chat window itself.

  1. When on their chat screen, tap the ellipses menu at the top-right corner and select Media, links, and docs.
  2. On the next screen, you’ll see all the files in that chat arranged by type. You don’t get the option to sort them by size, so you’ll have to scan the files manually.
  3. Select all the files and media that need to go and tap the trash icon in the top menu.

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A few more useful tools that can help you get your media off WhatsApp

It can be tough to keep track of your phone’s storage when you have a bunch of contacts and groups sending you all kinds of photos, videos, PDFs, and whatnot. If you fall under that group, you’ll appreciate having some smart tools that make your life easier.

Files by Google

Files by Google was originally designed for super-cheap phones running Android Go-edition to help users manage meager phone storage. As it turns out, you can use the same AI smarts to filter out WhatsApp files that need to be trashed. The Clean section of the app gives you an overview of what’s taking up the most space and gives suggestions based on what’s there in those images.

Frair warning: The Files by Google app messes up identifying the image content sometimes. Although its fairly accurate, you'll want to take a quick glance at the app's recommendations before you get rid of your WhatsApp media.

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Besides that, the Files app also highlights the WhatsApp images folder so that you don’t have to dig for the folder manually. That comes in handy if you prefer looking at all your WhatsApp media in one place instead of getting to them one chat at a time.

Save your photos to Google Photos

Google Photos continues to be the best photo management app for Android, and it’s no surprise that it works well for managing WhatsApp media, too. Of course, you'll what to keep your Google Photos feed organized, or you'll learn just how quickly 15GB of free Google Drive storage can disappear. Like Files, Photos also gives quick access to your WhatsApp media folders where you can back up any important stuff or get rid of what you don’t need anymore.

The backup feature on Google Photos is the most helpful. After the Google Photos app has backed up an important image or video on WhatsApp, you just need to use the Free up space feature, to remove it from WhatsApp

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Neither of these two apps is ideal when organizing a ton of WhatsApp files, but they do help trim down the clutter quite a bit to make it more manageable. There are a handful of third-party apps that claim to automate the entire process, but we advise going against them. That’s because many of them do image processing in the cloud, and we're guessing you wouldn’t want your personal photos to end up on a no-name remote server.

How to keep WhatsApp from hogging your phone storage in the future

You’ll probably find yourself scrambling to clear your phone’s storage in no time if you don’t prevent WhatsApp from filling up the space again. There are a few simple things you can do to ensure that.

Save a lot of space on WhatApp by turning off media auto-download

Head to Settings > Storage and data and deactivate auto-download for all file and network types. Doing this will give you control over what files you want to download on your phone and which are best left unseen.

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Hide your media visibility in the WhatsApp gallery

Those who just don’t want media shared on WhatsApp to show up in their phone’s gallery app can toggle it off from Settings > Chats > Media visibility. Instead of a universal rule, you can do that for individual chats and groups as well by going to their profile page > Media visibility > select no.

Note that doing this just won’t show the images and videos in the gallery app; they’ll still be downloaded in the default WhatsApp folder.

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Use WhatsApp web if you live on your laptop

People who spend most of their time on a computer should use WhatsApp web for their chats. Media files viewed on the desktop naturally don’t take up any space on your phone, though they still remain accessible whenever you need to download them. This is particularly helpful for single-use files that would otherwise live on your phone storage until you got to them manually.

WhatsApp isn't the only game in town

Yes, WhatsApp is the app everyone uses to chat (unless you're in the US), but it's not the only awesome third-party messaging platform. Check out our favorite end-to-end encrypted messaging apps if you want to chat with your friends and family in private.

Want to delete pics, videos etc from a WhatsApp chat and keep only texts? Here’s how

Home How To Want to delete pics, videos etc from a WhatsApp chat and keep only texts? Here’s how

WhatsApp saves all the photos, videos and GIFs from every chat when it backs up your chats. It’s unnecessary clutter and you really don’t need all that there, you can delete them from the chat itself and keep just the texts.

Since WhatsApp is literally the most popular messaging app out there, pretty much everyone is on it. While it's great for convenience, this also means that you will be bombarded with forwarded photos and videos you really do not want. 

Fortunately, for annoying chats like these, both individual and group chats, WhatsApp has introduced a forever mute option so as you are not annoyed by the alerts and can choose to check the messages if and when you want to.

There is also the option of turning down auto-downloads of media on your account so nothing, not even stickers, will be downloaded on your device unless you manually do it.

Also Read: WhatsApp to get join missed calls, biometric lock, new calls feature soon

In all this, there also might be some texts that you actually need and might want to keep so deleting entire texts is not an option. On WhatsApp you can choose to delete the media (photos, videos, GIFs etc) while keeping the messages only.

On both Android and iOS,

- Go to Settings, click on Data and Storage Usage, then click on Storage Usage.

- Select the contact or the group whose media you want to delete.

- Click on Manage and then tick all the boxes you want deleted - like photos or videos or GIFs, or all of them. Leave out the text messages box.

- Click on Clear and then confirm.

Alternately, you can see that you have the option to just keep the media and delete the texts. Pick what you need.

Going forward, you can adjust settings for particular group chats/contacts to prevent media from getting downloaded automatically.

On iOS, go to Chat, select the contact or the group chat you want to stop these auto-downloads for. Click on the contact or subject on top of the display, then go to Save to Camera Roll and change Default/Always to Never.

Also Read: WhatsApp now lets you mute chats forever

For Android, go to the contact or group chat, click on the top bar, select media visibility, change the settings here from default to a no or a yes, as you want. Click on okay to confirm your selection.

Across iOS, you can stop media from being saved to your camera roll by going to Settings, clicking on Chats and toggling off ‘Save to Camera Roll' from Default/Always to Never.

On Android you can do it by going to Settings, then Chats, then toggling off Show Media in Gallery or Media Visibility.

Special tip

There's another tried and tested way around this where you can take a look at what has been sent and then decide if you want to save that photo or video or not. This works only if you use WhatsApp Web chat.

On WhatsApp web, you can check out the media sent on the web first and then decide if you want to download it and save it on your smartphone. Downloading media on the web does not automatically save it on your smartphone.

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First Published Date: 27 Oct, 19:55 IST

Tags: whatsapp

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