Look at any full iPhone and the same thing is true: the photos are the noise, and the videos are the signal. A camera roll with 18,000 photos and 200 videos will usually have more space in the videos.
That makes videos the highest-leverage thing to work on, and unlike photos, you have an option other than deleting.
First: stop it getting worse
Sixty seconds, and it changes the size of everything you record from now on.
Settings → Camera → Record Video. The options and their approximate cost per minute:
| Setting | Per minute | Reasonable for |
|---|---|---|
| 4K, 60 fps | ~350 MB | Something you will properly edit |
| 4K, 30 fps | ~170 MB | Occasions you want to keep at full quality |
| 1080p, 60 fps | ~90 MB | Sport, anything with fast motion |
| 1080p, 30 fps | ~65 MB | Almost everything |
1080p at 30 fps is a fifth of the size of 4K60 and looks identical on a phone. On a large TV, sitting at a normal distance, most people cannot reliably pick them apart either.
While you are in Settings → Camera, two more worth checking: Formats → High Efficiency (HEVC, roughly half the size of the older format for the same quality), and Preserve Settings → Live Photo, if you would rather Live Photo stayed off between sessions.
Then: find the ones you already have
Photos → Albums → Media Types → Videos.
You are looking for the long ones. Sort your attention by duration rather than date: a 45-second clip is irrelevant no matter what it is, and a 12-minute clip of a concert filmed from the back of a hall is 2 GB.
The usual suspects, in the order they are worth checking:
- Screen recordings. Almost always disposable, and often long.
- Videos of a screen or a stage from a distance. Never rewatched, invariably big.
- The same event filmed three times. Keep the best take.
- Videos sent to you in Messages or WhatsApp that got saved to your roll.
Trimming: the free saving nobody uses
Most long videos are half dead footage — the walk up to the thing, the fumbling at the end. The Photos app can cut that off, for free:
Open the video and tap Edit
The frame timeline appears at the bottom.
Drag the yellow handles in
Cut to the part you actually care about.
Tap Done, then Save Video as New Clip
Choosing new clip keeps the original as well, which is the safe option — but it means no space is saved until you delete the original. Do that once you have checked the trim.
On a ten-minute video where the good part is ninety seconds, this is an 85% saving with no quality loss whatsoever, because trimming does not re-encode.
Compressing: keeping the moment, dropping the gigabytes
Some videos you do not want to delete and cannot trim — the whole thing matters. Those are the candidates for re-encoding: writing a new, smaller file at a lower bitrate or resolution.
The trade is real but small in practice. Dropping a 4K clip to 1080p removes about two-thirds of the file and is invisible on the screens you will watch it on. Compressing hard on top of that starts to show in fast motion and in dark scenes.
You need a tool for this. Our app's Pro tier includes it — pick Small, Balanced or Best, see the projected saving before anything runs, and the original is only replaced once the new file is written. A 1 GB clip typically lands somewhere between 30 and 80 MB depending on the preset. Plenty of other apps do the same job, and if you have a computer to hand, HandBrake does it free.
Live Photos: the hidden video in your photos
Every Live Photo is a still plus about three seconds of video. On a library with thousands of them, that video is a real amount of storage for something most people never play.
You can convert a Live Photo to a plain still and keep the frame you wanted. Individually it is in the Photos app: open the photo, tap Live at the top left, choose Off. In batches you need an app — ours converts them in one pass, as does Clever Cleaner, which is free.
If you would rather not create more of them, tap the Live Photo button in the Camera app to turn it off, then set Settings → Camera → Preserve Settings → Live Photo so it stays off.
The order that works
Change the recording setting
1080p at 30 fps. Everything from here is smaller.
Delete the obvious videos
Screen recordings, distant stages, duplicate takes.
Trim the long keepers
Free, lossless, and the biggest saving per minute of effort on this page.
Compress what remains
The ones you want in full, at a fraction of the size.
Empty Recently Deleted
As always, nothing is freed until you do.
Once the videos are handled, the rest of the library is a numbers game — thousands of small decisions, best made quickly. That part is the fastest way to clean up 20,000 photos.
Frequently asked
- How much space does 4K video use on iPhone?
- Roughly 350 MB per minute at 4K and 60 fps, about 170 MB per minute at 4K and 30 fps, and around 65 MB per minute at 1080p and 30 fps. A ten-minute 4K clip is comfortably larger than three thousand photos.
- Does compressing a video lose quality?
- Yes, by definition — re-encoding discards data. Whether you can see it is another question. Going from 4K to 1080p is invisible on a phone screen and usually invisible on a TV from a normal viewing distance. Heavy compression on top of that shows up first in fast motion and in dark scenes.
- Can I compress videos without an app?
- Partly. The Photos app lets you trim a clip and save it as a new video, which is the biggest single saving available on most long videos since the dead footage at each end is often half the file. For actual re-encoding you need either an app or a computer.
- Should I record in 4K at all?
- If you are filming something you will edit or keep forever, yes. For everyday clips, 1080p at 30 fps is the sensible default — it looks the same on the devices you will actually watch it on and it costs a third of the storage.