You can set WhatsApp not to automatically download certain media files. — Screengrab from YouTube
Is your phone clogged up by Good Morning pictures from WhatsApp messages? Good news, the company is rolling out a tool this week to help you deal with that.
In a tweet, the company said the Manage Storage feature will make it easy to review and delete media files en masse to free up space.
Once available, the feature can be found under Settings > Storage and Data > Manage Storage.
Users will be able to view the amount of space occupied by WhatsApp media and delete files based on categories like “Forwarded many times” or files that are “Larger than 5MB”.
All the files that fall within a category will be shown, allowing the user to selectively delete them or get rid of all at one go.
Currently, the app only allows files to be chosen according to chats and based on categories such as GIFs or videos, but there is no option to preview the items before deleting them.
However, even the new feature doesn’t guarantee that if you delete the files from WhatsApp, they will be deleted from your device.
To check if the files are still on your device, go to the media gallery and look for the WhatsApp folder (usually called WhatsApp Images). If they are still there, you will have to delete them manually.
You can also configure WhatsApp not to automatically download media files embedded in messages.
Under Data and Storage Usage, look for Media Auto-download and select the media type – photos, audio, videos or documents – that you want downloaded when using mobile data, WiFi or roaming.
WhatsApp also recently introduced disappearing messages and announced that users can select to mute group notifications to "Always".
In a tweet, the company said the Manage Storage feature will make it easy to review and delete media files en masse to free up space.
Once available, the feature can be found under Settings > Storage and Data > Manage Storage.
Users will be able to view the amount of space occupied by WhatsApp media and delete files based on categories like “Forwarded many times” or files that are “Larger than 5MB”.
All the files that fall within a category will be shown, allowing the user to selectively delete them or get rid of all at one go.
Currently, the app only allows files to be chosen according to chats and based on categories such as GIFs or videos, but there is no option to preview the items before deleting them.
However, even the new feature doesn’t guarantee that if you delete the files from WhatsApp, they will be deleted from your device.
To check if the files are still on your device, go to the media gallery and look for the WhatsApp folder (usually called WhatsApp Images). If they are still there, you will have to delete them manually.
You can also configure WhatsApp not to automatically download media files embedded in messages.
Under Data and Storage Usage, look for Media Auto-download and select the media type – photos, audio, videos or documents – that you want downloaded when using mobile data, WiFi or roaming.
WhatsApp also recently introduced disappearing messages and announced that users can select to mute group notifications to "Always".
