Nicole Nguyen

I think we live in a more media-rich time than before.

And also as our phone's camera resolution gets better, our photos and videos also increase in file sizes.

We're at something like 170 zettabytes in generated data.

And IDC predicts that over the next five years, we're going to triple that amount because every time you prompt AI, you're generating more data.

Now you can make your own images and videos too.

And that means that our cloud storage has to expand also.

The first step, if you are always running into that storage full notification, or if you just refuse to pay more to these cloud providers is

is to look at what is taking up space in the cloud.

Most of these providers have tools where you can see a breakdown of exactly what apps, what files are taking up the most amount of gigabytes and how each family member is using up that storage.

Yeah, so the biggest thing that you can do right now is to make sure that when you take photos and videos, it's being saved as a high efficiency file.

It's called HEIC for photos and HEVC for videos.

There's a setting in your camera settings to turn on high efficiency capture.

And this is on by default for most iPhones.

And on Android phones, you probably have to turn this on.

Another thing that you can do is...

selectively use live photos.

So live photos can double the size of an image because it's also taking this multi-second video clip.

And there's a toggle in the camera app for iPhones and Android phones where you can turn it on and off.

So local drives are the nuclear option if you want to escape the cloud altogether.

They can also be a good option if you want a backup to the cloud.