How to conduct a media detox on your digital devices

Although manufacturers encourage us to view consumer electronics as disposable whenever a new model is launched, many of us become attached to our digital devices.

Laptops get covered with stickers, smartphones carry memories as well as apps, a tablet may be a child’s favourite possession and tower PCs are capable of many years of faithful service.

Mechanical components tend to be highly reliable, but one area that commonly causes issues is storage – or a lack thereof.

In an age of sprawling apps, live photos and bloatware-loaded operating systems (OS), internal memory fills up surprisingly quickly.

When you start receiving warning notifications about a lack of available space, doing nothing has clearly ceased to be an option.

Instead, it may be time to purchase that new model after all.

Alternatives include transferring files to an external storage device (if that’s possible) or performing a media detox.

The latter is a time-consuming yet surprisingly rewarding process where a device is purged of unwanted or unnecessary files and documents.

Here’s how to go about it.

Media detox 101

Not every file, folder, app or utility on your digital devices deserves its place.

A quarter of smartphone apps are abandoned – though not necessarily deleted – after a single use. Removing them could free up valuable storage space.

Computers often have software installations conducted for a specific purpose, which then languish unused while taking up space alongside the OS and essential applications.

And then there are media files.

Rather than a single photograph, Apple devices often capture burst photos with ten images per second, multiplying tenfold the amount of storage needed to save them.

Video footage on newer smartphones can be 8K resolution, which could require several gigabytes of space to store a single minute of footage.

These media files may be consuming a significant percentage of total device storage. But where do you start if you want to carry out a media detox ?

Eternal sunshine of the spotless drive

The first thing to do is check how much space your device currently has available.

Smartphones often present montages of historic photos ‘from this day’, which is an ideal opportunity to delete any unwanted images from today’s date in previous years.

Erasing old photos might seem heretical, but many of them will be blurry or low-quality, no longer needed or wanted, or taken for a purpose long since forgotten.

A more direct approach involves scrolling through image libraries and deleting any duplicate pictures, plus every photo where you can’t remember why you took it.

Your current device may have pulled photos from a previous one into its memory, but if these are already backed up anywhere else, the duplication is unnecessary.

As for those wobbly video clips taken at an event two years ago, you’re unlikely to want to watch them back, and nobody else will enjoy being subjected to them, either.

On OS where you can order files by size, focus on trimming larger video files, since more space will be freed up once they’re erased.

It’s fine to keep photos of pets, children, partners and holidays, but some will inevitably be better than others and there’s no need to retain every last one.

Having deleted photos and videos, turn your attention to other media files.

Downloaded PDFs, saved cookies, temporary internet files and stored webpages are unlikely to have any relevance months or years later, yet they won’t delete themselves.

Also taking up valuable storage space will be documents – old shopping lists, to-do notes and suchlike – and downloaded email attachments which you already have on the original emails.

Some social media apps will be saved onto your phone whether you want them or not, like WhatsApp. Again, received images will clog up your storage unless you’re proactive.

Once your media detox is complete, revisit the available space statistic on your device to see how much you’ve achieved.

If it’s still insufficient, it may be necessary to investigate more technical options like a hard drive defrag or transferring files to additional storage like the cloud.