Many people wonder whether it is really necessary to empty the WhatsApp “trash” every month or whether it is yet another click-bait headline that some online newspapers use to attract the attention of their readers. Let’s immediately clarify the issue by saying that doing a little cleaning on your smartphone never hurts. If you have a mobile phone that has a rather modest amount of memory, therefore 64 GB or less, the operation could be particularly useful to avoid having to deal with a phone that, due to limited space, becomes terribly slow. In this in-depth study we will explain in more detail what emptying the “trash” in WhatsApp consists of, who should do it and, of course, also how to do it safely on Android and iPhone.
Why emptying WhatsApp trash is necessary
WhatsApp tends to take up more and more memory, especially if we are part of particularly active groups or often exchange videos and voice messages with our contacts. Multimedia files are “heavier” than text, and require more megabytes or gigabytes to store. If you leave the setting that automatically downloads the media received in chat to the device active, photos and videos received from other contacts will over time clog up the smartphone’s internal storage space, especially if you have a device with an already rather limited amount of starting memory (to be clear, 64 GB or even less). If the available storage decreases to the point that very few GB are left free, the device may begin to suffer from slowdowns and lag quite obvious.
It is for this reason that many users are interested in emptying the WhatsApp “trash”. Before we explain how to do this, let us clarify one thing: in reality, WhatsApp does not have any hidden trash can. The famous Meta messaging app, in fact, has an easily available feature, called Manage space, which guides the user in deleting files saved on the device that have been received in WhatsApp and that are taking up space. It will be this function that we will focus on in this in-depth analysis.
How to delete messages and media to free up space on WhatsApp
Before freeing the space occupied by WhatsApp media, we suggest you make a backup. What is it about? A copy of the data that can be saved on cloud services, such as Google Drive or iCloud, and serves to protect the contents of chats from inadvertent deletion. If you don’t know how to backup WhatsApp, help yourself with the instructions we have provided in our dedicated article. Once this is done, you can finally use the internal tool called “Manage Space”.
Android
On Android, to manage WhatsApp files, we open the app, go to the Chats tab, tap the three dots at the top right and follow the path Settings, then Storage and data, then Manage space. At this point we see the list of chats sorted by size. We enter the heavier one, select individual elements with a long touch, or use total selection if we want to delete everything. We press the trash can icon and choose whether to remove important items or only duplicate copies. By confirming the operation, the files are deleted from the phone’s memory, without affecting the text messages.
For those who use Android there is also an alternative method via file manager, such as Files by Google. We can manually navigate to the path Android > media > com.whatsapp > WhatsApp > Media. Here we find subfolders with images, videos, audio and documents, including copies that sometimes remain even after deletion from chats. By holding down the files we can delete them directly. It is advisable to sort files by size, so as to identify the largest and least useful ones first.
iPhone
On iPhone the logic is identical to what we have already seen for the first method that we illustrated in the section dedicated to Android. Also in this case we open the WhatsApp app, tap Settings at the bottom right, then Space and data and finally Manage space. Here too we find the chats sorted by weight. We enter the conversation that takes up the most memory, tap Select, choose the files to delete or select them all and use the dustbin icon to confirm. If we also want to remove duplicates, we choose the dedicated option.
How many months should you clean the app
But let’s now come to the question with which we introduced ourselves and clarify once and for all how many months to clean WhatsApp. The answer is… Depends. What does it depend on? From your device, in this case from the storage space available initially and, secondly, from the flow of information you receive on WhatsApp. Just to give an example, if you have a device with little memory (64 or even 32 GB), on which many apps are installed and through which you exchange numerous photos and videos, you will probably have to carry out the aforementioned cleaning operations more frequently. Otherwise, you could reduce this “maintenance” activity over time.
