How to Check How Much Storage Space is Used & Available on iPhone or iPad

Knowing how much space you have used on an iOS device and, maybe even more useful and more relevant, knowing how much storage you have remaining, are two important things for any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch owner.

This guide will show you how to find out just how much storage space is available and used within iOS, whether on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You’ll simply look no further than the Settings application on the iPhone or iPad, though how you find the information can vary per iOS version. Here’s what you’ll want to do to find the device Storage usage details:

How to Check Storage Space Used & Available on iPhone or iPad

For modern iOS releases on iPhone and iPad, you can easily check how much storage is used on the device by looking at the device settings:

1. Open Settings in iOS



2. Tap on “General”
3. Tap on “iPhone Storage” (or “iPad Storage”) and wait a moment to see the storage used along with categories and data points for where storage is being consumed

As you can see, the Storage calculation will give you the amount of storage currently used, and going further it will break the storage used into sectional categories, like apps, photos, videos, Other, and so forth.

This applies to all modern iOS versions, from iOS 12, iOS 11, and iOS 10 and obviously anything newer than these as well. If you have a newer iPhone or iPad, you probably have a new enough system software version that the above steps apply to you.

Older iOS versions are slightly different to check available storage.

How to Check Storage Space Used on Older iOS Versions

For iOS 10 and earlier, the way to check iPhone and iPad stage space that is used and available is as such:

• Open Settings and tap on “General”
• Tap on “Usage” and wait for the spinning loading indicator to finish populating with data, look for the storage available and storage used data points at the top of the installed app list

The iPhone and iPod touch displays this data at the very top:

The iPad shows this data spread across the top of the screen too, looking slightly differently in even older versions of iOS, like iOS 6 and iOS 5, but note the information is the same in that it reveals storage information:

Scrolling further down you’ll find how much space individual apps use, most of which are reasonably small but some games like Rage HD are enormous and will take up tons of MB’s of capacity. If you don’t find yourself using the largest apps in this list, or if you’ve already beaten a game and don’t play it any longer, you can always delete them now and then redownload them anytime in the future for free, all you need to do is go back to iTunes and the Purchased list to be able to access any apps you’ve bought or downloaded in the past.

A few other important things to note: The Videos app shows a combined total of video storage on the iOS device, if you’re experiencing capacity issues you may want to remove individual videos that you have already watched, as each one can take up quite a bit of space as well. It’s not uncommon for HD video’s to be several GB large, meaning just a few of those will have eaten up all but the largest capacity versions of iOS hardware.

Finally, and particularly for iPhone users, check the Photos & Camera section too, because photos can also take up tons of space and knowing how much storage they’re using is a good way to determine if it’s time to back all the pictures up to a computer so that you’ll be able to remove them and take more, if you don’t regularly transfer the pictures to a computer and run out of space while you’re on the go, you’ll be stuck having to manually delete them to try and clear up space, and that’s no fun.