How to Help an Older Relative “Clean Up” an iPhone

Okay, so you’ve decided to be nice and help your grandma (or mom, or aunt, or godparent . . . you get the idea) clean up their iPhone. First of all, that’s very nice of you. Second, here’s how to do so without pulling your hair out.

Sign Up for iCloud

Your relative will need a backup for their stuff and iCloud is a simple, effective, and inexpensive way to get that. Once all their stuff is backed up, you can go about cleaning up the iPhone without a fear of losing important stuff.

Go Through Pictures

Okay, buckle up. If your mom is anything like ours, she’s got about twenty thousand grandkid pictures on her phone, at least 50% of which are duplicates. The easiest thing to do is to just migrate them all to iCloud and be done with it.

The slightly less easy thing to do is make the pictures on the phone low res and upload all the high res ones to iCloud. Just go to Settings, then Photos, then Optimize iPhone Storage. All photos on the phone will now be low res and a much smaller file size while the ones on iCloud will be the real, larger size.

Now, the slightly more difficult but best option would be to delete your mom’s duplicate pictures. Until 2022, that meant sitting there and doing it picture by picture. Fortunately, Apple has a feature that now makes this more straightforward. Open up Photos and tap Albums. Select Utilities, then Duplicates. Now you can see all the duplicate pictures on the phone. You can delete them individually, but why? Instead, tap Select All and delete them all at the same time. Boom!

One last note: deleted photos aren’t actually deleted right away. They’re moved to the Recently Deleted album where they sit for 30 days. You can permanently delete them from there though.

Delete Old Apps

Sit there with your older relative and look through every app. If they don’t use an app, delete it. If you’re feeling extra generous, sort the remaining apps into folders.

You can also offload apps. Basically, your phone will delete the app but keep the settings intact. The app icon is still there, but the app would need to be redownloaded again to be used. This might be a good option for apps that aren’t used frequently.

Look at the Storage Data

Go to Settings, then General, then Storage. Here, you’ll see a graph showing how much space on an iPhone is being used, how much is free, and what apps are using the most space. From here, you can help your relative troubleshoot where all their space is going. Selecting each app individually will show you what exactly is taking up space—documents, data, music, photos, etc. You may also have options to delete some of these things depending on what the app is and how it works. Maybe you’ll find that your relative has their entire ebook library on their phone, and you’ll just need to show them how to rotate a few titles in and out. Or maybe they’ve never cleared their browsing data, and Safari is becoming a space hog. You won’t know until you check.

Bonus Tip: How to Literally Clean an iPhone (Or Any Phone)

Unplug and turn off your phone. Use a slightly damp microfiber cloth to wipe it down. Do not use any cleaning products unless you’re disinfecting your phone. Never immerse it or use compressed air on it.

If you’re disinfecting your iPhone, use 70% isopropyl alcohol wipes, 75% ethyl alcohol wipes, or Clorox Disinfecting Wipes. Wipe gently.