It is common for us to receive all kinds of files via WhatsApp and much more on special dates where memes or congratulations are common. Although the messaging application is comfortable and practical to talk with anyone we can think of, having a mobile phone full of photos, videos or audios can be a problem and can affect its performance. Therefore, you can automatically delete files received by WhatsApp and have enough space.
There are applications that allow you to automatically delete all your files every certain time but you can also block downloads so that your gallery of files does not fill up. Normally, the video and photo files are stored in a specific folder in your gallery that you can permanently delete, but audios, GIFs, voice messages are also stored … In that case, you can follow a few steps to delete everything, from audio files to deleting WhatsApp messages so they don’t take up space.
Block downloads
The most practical thing is to bet on blocking downloads on WhatsApp and thus we will not have to automatically delete files received by WhatsApp but we will directly be the ones who choose what we receive and what not. You can have absolute control either with WiFi, with data rate or data roaming. Once you choose what you want and what you do not want, you will see that WhatsApp asks you first if you would like to download a received file. If you know it is a meme or any video that can be dangerous, it will not appear in your gallery.
To do this you can follow some very simple steps:
- Open WhatsApp on your mobile phone
- Go to the settings by clicking in the upper right corner
- Choose the option “Data and storages” in the menu
- Go to the ” Automatic download ” section
- You will see three options
- Download with mobile data
- Download with WiFi
- In data roaming
- Mark the option “None” in the three
On iOS you can also do it in a similar way:
- Open WhatsApp on your iPhone
- Click on the “Settings” button in the lower right corner
- Go to the section “Data and storage”
- You will see four options
- Photos
- Audio
- Videos
- Documents
- Choose in each of them that it is never downloaded
Now you will have full power to choose what is downloaded and what is not and thus you will not have to automatically delete files received by WhatsApp. But if you prefer not to disable this option or still download everything, we explain more tricks.
Delete files from a conversation
You do not necessarily have to erase photo by photo in a conversation to lighten space on your mobile phone, you can delete it in a single stroke. In a couple of seconds you will have freed up space and it is especially useful in the case of WhatsApp groups in which it is usual to send videos continuously , jokes, memes, group photos … And you end up with 4 or 5 GB of space because of that group.
You can delete chat by chat, group by group. We explain how:
- Open your WhatsApp application on your mobile phone
- Go to the settings and open the different Menu options
- Click on the option “Data and storage”
- You will see all your conversations and the space of each one
- Choose the one you want from the entire list available (ordered by space)
Once inside the conversation you want, you will see all the space that is in:
- Text messages
- Contacts
- Locations
- Photos
- Stickers
- GIF
- Videos
- Audio messages
- Documents
To automatically delete and delete files received by WhatsApp, click on the bottom of the screen where you will find “Free up space”. Once you have done it, you can delete all the elements of the conversation or the type of elements you want. That is, you can delete only photos, only videos, only audio messages, only documents … Choose what you are not interested in and it will be deleted directly.
You can repeat this process with all your WhatsApp conversations if you think they are full of documents, photographs or videos that do not interest you.
Specialized applications
If you don’t want to have to do the above, you can download applications specifically dedicated to automatically delete WhatsApp files. You will find many of them on Google Play (they are not so common for iOS in the App Store) and their function is to periodically delete all the content you want. They are not especially advisable if you want to keep part of the data. The cleaner will automatically erase your received files, and there may be something you want to keep, so the above method is more advisable. However, if you want to delete everything you can use these apps.
WhatsApp Cleaner
In Google Play you will find many similar ones and WhatsApp Cleaner is one of them. Automatic and without the need for you to activate this periodic cleaning as it takes care of doing it alone. That is, you can set how often you want all the files to be deleted and it will automatically. The interesting thing about this application is that it allows you to choose that only duplicate files are deleted, so you will not delete important things or lose them. But also, beyond adjusting the time limit, you can adjust the space limit: you can mark that the files are deleted when they exceed a maximum number of gigs. That is, if your mobile phone has less than 4 GB available at that time, the cleaner will automatically start to act and remove.
Cleaner for WhatsApp
This application is similar to the previous one and allows you to free memory by time or by file size. Basically, you will choose if you want to delete everything, if you want files greater than a certain weight (100 KB or 1 MB) to be deleted or if you want all WhatsApp files that are older than a week, older than a month to be deleted or earlier than the last three months. You will not have to delete chat by chat but they will all be automatically deleted.
