Make Room for Travel
A full phone halfway through a trip is not an inconvenience, it is a photo you do not get to take. Make the room before you leave, not from a hotel bed at midnight.
Free up 10 GB before you fly
- Target
- 10 GB
- Runs
- April 15 to May 31
- Status
- Returns April 15
Free up 10 GB, or review the whole seasonal queue. Either one completes the challenge, so you never have to delete a photo you wanted in order to finish.
Get Cleanor and be readyWhy this moment feels timely
Storage becomes an emotional problem about ten minutes before it becomes a technical one. It is the alert that appears while something is happening in front of you and the phone will not save it.
Cleanor is faster than the alternative, which is deleting at random on a phone you are trying to shoot with. It groups the heavy videos and the repeated frames so a week of room comes back in one sitting at home.
Where Cleanor helps first
The clutter worth going after this season, and a sensible order to do it in.
What Cleanor looks at
- Large videos taking the most room
- Bursts and near-duplicate frames
- Old screenshots and saved images
- Space recovered before you pack
How to approach it
- Go after the videos first. One long clip can outweigh hundreds of photos, so a few decisions there buy back more room than an hour spent on stills.
- Then take the bursts. Ten frames of the same wave, the same jump, the same face: keep one, and the other nine were never doing anything.
- Do this at home, with time and a full battery. Nothing good gets decided about your photos while you are standing in a queue with four percent left.
Why this is worth doing now
The cost of a full phone is not the notification. It is the shot you were about to take. Storage always runs out at the exact moment something is worth photographing, and the thirty seconds you then spend deleting at random are thirty seconds of the thing you came to see. That is a bad trade, and it is entirely avoidable the week before.
There is a second cost, quieter than the first. Photos deleted in a panic are chosen badly. On a phone held at arm’s length in bright sun, with a queue moving and the battery low, every old picture looks disposable, and some of the ones that go were not. Clearing space at home, unhurried, is the only version of this decision you can actually trust.
Cleanor works through the parts that are genuinely taking the room: the long videos, the bursts where ten frames captured one second, the screenshots from planning the trip you are now about to take. Every group is shown to you before anything moves. You leave with space for a week of photographs, and you never have to think about it again while you are away.
Useful pages around this challenge
What comes up next
The seasonal moments arriving soonest after this one.
Vacation Video Review
One trip can outweigh a year of photographs. A few minutes of 4K footage runs to gigabytes, so the fastest way back to free space is to review the videos first.
Open the challengeRunning now, to September 20Back-to-School Screenshot Reset
Screenshots are information with an expiry date, stored like photographs that never have one. A term’s worth of schedules, reading lists and receipts is the easiest thing to clear.
Open the challengeStarts in 16 daysClean Before the Transfer
A transfer moves whatever you point it at, including years of duplicates and videos you have never rewatched. Clean the old iPhone first: less to move, and a camera roll you chose.
Open the challenge