WhatsApp groups are fun, especially if it has all your best pals joking around and sharing memes from the Internet to take each other’s case. Frankly speaking, the exchange of memes, GIFs, and other media in a WhatsApp group, or even an individual chat, begins to hog a substantial amount of memory on your phone. This problem was realised by WhatsApp and it quickly brought a solution.
If you have not checked the feature, it lets you stop WhatsApp from saving the media content to your phone’s gallery. You can already disable the auto-download settings for images and videos but many users are not aware that they can stop these images and videos from reaching the phone’s memory and filling it unnecessarily. Here’s how to stop photos, GIFs, and videos from getting saved to your phone:
- Open WhatsApp on your Android phone or iPhone
- Go to Settings by clicking on the three-dot menu on Android and navigating to the extreme right tab on iPhone
- Tap on Chats available in the Settings
- You will see the ‘Media visibility’ option under the Chats settings on Android and ‘Save to Camera Roll’ option on iPhone
- You now need to turn it off to stop WhatsApp from automatically saving photos and videos to your phone’s storage
That’s it. The images and videos that you will receive in a chat will not be saved on its own. You can still export the photo to your phone’s gallery or other third-party app installed on your phone for editing purposes. If you have auto-download settings enabled, the media will be downloaded as it arrives in the chat but otherwise, you will need to tap on the message to download it. It should be kept in mind that audio messages will be saved automatically on your phone’s storage and there’s no option to turn that off.
