Storage space running out! My phone is almost five years old, going to hit six in June perhaps. A long way it has served me, through the different phases of my life, ups and downs. Performance-wise, I'm not seeing that much lag, fortunately, but the storage issue was bugging a lot, was left with around 400MB out of 128GB storage. So what to do?
I didn’t do any gaming on this; I occasionally played Clash of Clans. Also, I have installed only the necessary applications, nothing to take up space and slow me down. So here the Apps & System got nothing much for me to clean up. Also, I don't listen to any music, nor watch movies or that kinda videos on my phone that need offline storage. Also, I had cleaned up documents kinda files, and stuff already.
The only thing left was my Gallery, the photos, and all. Even though I have deleted them from time to time, they still got huge in size. 45GB in total.
So I entered the gallery, scrolled down to the oldest images, 2020 it was. It was date was sorted. So what I did was select all on a date and kept unmarking only a few to keep, the rest would be deleted. I kept repeating the same thing over and over again, selecting all date-wise and then disselecting a few to keep, selecting and disselecting. Did the same for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and for the first half of 2025. Guess what, I have deleted 30GB+ photos.
📸 Ambitious Studio* | Rick Barrett
The thing is, I noticed something heartwarming. It's like a tour of my life down the line. Those images around 2022-2023 were different, used to portray a different phase of my life, a completely different version of me. Maybe that was the peak time of my life. Never have I ever felt so amazing and enjoyed my life to this scale.
Standing at this crucial phase of my life, while scrolling amidst those moments, I was feeling like crying aloud. Why on earth did I have to end up messing up so badly? I am still clueless. Okay, whatever it is, I was deleting those moments, scrolling and scrolling, out of the selected 50, I kept only 5/7 for the sake of remembering that I, too, had some amazing moments in my life that I have cherished. So I was selecting, slowly scrolling, unmarking a few. Have deleted almost five to six thousand photos that I have taken in the past six years.
I could see the change of time, my situation, and all the surroundings via those photos. Why did I stop in mid 2025? Because I was feeling sad about the transition from being a chill guy to a stressed one. Like seeing moments getting uglier, and that's when I stopped. Had enough, need to cherish the beautiful impact within myself.