The trouble is, I started running into a wall with my Galaxy Flip 7 because I was stubbornly reluctant to purge my memories from its local storage.<\/p>\n
With 256GB on board, I had consumed nearly half of my capacity in a few short months of heavy use. It made me worry that I’d face the dreaded “Full storage” alert<\/a> before the end of the year.<\/p>\n Fortunately, I stumbled across a handful of software tweaks and hidden settings in One UI that reclaimed a massive chunk of space, all without sacrificing my precious photos and videos (well, mostly).<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n \t\t Google Photos’ cleanup tool is a reliable way to free up storage, but video playback may be slightly downgraded<\/p>\n Know what’s taking the bulk of your space<\/p>\n My gallery is creating duplicate copies of my photos and videos<\/p>\n The majority of my consumed space comes down to media, specifically video clips shot in 1080p at 60fps or 4K at 30fps. A few heavy clips can fill up local storage faster than water slipping through a colander.<\/p>\n On top of that, I edit a ton of media on my device. I’ve found myself doing this even more on the Galaxy Z Flip 7, thanks to its expansive suite of editing tools and noticeably tighter AI integrations compared to my Google Pixel 9 Pro XL.<\/p>\n However, this workflow is what secretly gobbles up my phone’s capacity. Every time I edit a file, Samsung Gallery<\/a> saves a pre-edit backup.<\/p>\n Depending on the media and edits I made, it can double the size of the same file.<\/p>\n While that isn’t much of an issue for snapshots, it becomes a massive headache when you’re tweaking heavy video clips. Over time, you accumulate gigabytes of redundant, unused original versions.<\/p>\n I decided to look into the Gallery and system menus, and I found a few clever features to cure my storage-full anxiety (before I lost my mind completely).<\/p>\n You get to select which items to keep<\/p>\n The primary fix for this clutter isn’t actually baked into the Gallery app itself. Instead, it lives deep within One UI’s system menus.<\/p>\n Head into the Device care menu, and you’ll find a host of storage-saving utilities that offer smart suggestions rather than forcing you to blindly delete your media.<\/p>\n In my case, it identified about 3.8GB of “invisible backup” versions that I was not aware of. Continuing this step clears the unedited originals while preserving my final edits.<\/p>\n Strictly speaking, you are technically deleting old data here, but you retain the finished copies you want.<\/p>\n The only real caveat is that after you wipe these pre-edits, you can’t restore an edited file to its original state.<\/p>\n To find this option, open Settings > Device care > Storage, and check under Suggestions for the clear pre-edits prompt.<\/p>\n You can wipe everything with a single tap or manually select items, which comes in handy if you need to keep both the original master file and the edited copy.<\/p>\n But it’s effective<\/p>\n There is another trick, which leans on a classic style, that involves manually emptying your system trash.<\/p>\n The Samsung Gallery app keeps deleted photos and videos in a temporary trash bin for 30 days before permanently purging them.<\/p>\n Leaving this bin uncleared means those files continue to eat the storage until they are automatically purged.<\/p>\n Removing them manually reclaims that space consumed. Depending on how often you delete unwanted images and videos, clearing this can restore several gigabytes.<\/p>\n When I checked mine, I had nearly 2GB idling across my combined file and gallery bins. That is a generous amount to free up for hundreds of new photos and several clips.<\/p>\n It’s easy to use since One UI gives Trash its own dedicated button inside the Storage management tool.<\/p>\n Open Storage management inside Device care, tap Trash, select Gallery or Files, and select the items to delete.<\/p>\n Relying on the cloud is another option<\/p>\n It’s an aggressive way to restore the bulk of my storage<\/p>\n If you need to reclaim a massive chunk of space in one fell swoop, offloading media to Google One or OneDrive is your best bet.<\/p>\n OneDrive is deeply baked into Samsung’s native Gallery (but that’s ending in September), and depending on your account bonuses, you might have up to 40GB ready to use.<\/p>\n My setup nets me 30GB of free cloud storage space (15GB from Samsung and 15GB via Microsoft), which gives me a lot of space for media and general files.<\/p>\n Much like Google Photos, Samsung Gallery lets you use the Free up space feature<\/a> to remove locally stored copies of items that have been synced to the cloud.<\/p>\n You still retain the option to download these photos and videos to local memory whenever you need them.<\/p>\n The main catch is that browsing your gallery feels noticeably sluggish afterward, as larger video files must be streamed or downloaded on the fly.<\/p>\n Still, if you need to restore the bulk of your local storage without nuking your library, this remains a top-tier option.<\/p>\n Put apps in the archive<\/p>\n My personal information is saved<\/p>\n There’s another classic Android trick that reclaims space without touching your precious library: app archiving.<\/p>\n Archiving is equivalent to deep freeze for apps you rarely touch. It deletes the app’s core components while preserving your app data and settings.<\/p>\n When you need to reinstall the app later, you can retain where you left off since your accounts, passwords, and settings are retained.<\/p>\n A single archiving process for apps I rarely use freed up roughly 5GB of space.<\/p>\n However, tapping Select all when prompted will uninstall your apps rather than archive them. Instead, you can pick the default suggested apps list to stay safe.<\/p>\n I set this to run every month or two, which also serves as a great way to keep tabs on what software I need to uninstall.<\/p>\n When archiving apps, select the default list to avoid uninstalling them. You can reinstall them later and continue where you left off.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n
\n ![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/google-photos-icon-hero-jpg.jpg\"\/){kind=icon}
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\n\t\t\tI was terrified to let Google delete almost 150GB of my videos and photos, but it’s the best thing I have ever done
\n\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Samsung](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/a-samsung-galaxy-phone-with-the-screen-showing-storage-system.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Pre-edit](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-of-samsung-manage-storage-feature-with-pre-edits-or-invisible-backup-highlighted.jpg\")
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-of-invisible-backups-on-samsung-gallery-pre-edit-versions.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Trash](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/a-samsung-phone-showing-the-manage-storage-section-and-trash-bin-feature.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/samsung-galaxy-app-on-a-phone-showing-pictures-of-cats-and-a-bicycle.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-of-app-archive-in-mange-storage-on-one-ui-settings.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-of-app-archiving-button-pop-up-on-samsung-s-manage-storage-section.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n ![\"Reasons](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reasons-i-prefer-samsung-gallery-over-google-photos.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/samsung-galaxy-phone-with-its-home-screen-showing-gallery-and-photos-apps-with-chrome-and-messenger..jpeg\")
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