WhatsApp makes it easier to clean up GIF and photo spam

All the GIFs, memes, random photos and videos your friends send through WhatsApp could pile up and eat a huge chunk of your device’s storage without you noticing. It can be a pain having to go through all of them when it’s time for a cleanup, which is why the app’s new storage manager is a welcome feature. The messaging service has started rolling out a new storage management tool worldwide, and it makes cleanup easier by helping you identify, select and bulk delete files.

WhatsApp’s new tool conveniently groups together large files and media that’s been forwarded many times so you can easily select multiple items and mass delete them quickly. It also sorts files by size in descending order, making it much easier to decide on what to delete first. To help prevent accidental deletions, which could certainly happen now that it’s much easier to purge numerous files all at once, the tool also shows you a preview of the media you have saved.

Of course, you can always just switch off WhatsApp’s default autosave setting for files by going to Settings and switching off “Save to Camera Roll” or “Media visibility,” depending on your OS. But if you prefer keeping the autosave/autodownload feature on and just want to delete files every once in a while, you can access the new tool by going to Settings > Storage and data > Manage storage.