How to delete unnecessary and hidden WhatsApp media on your phone

WhatsApp is a convenient way to interact with friends and family, thanks to built-in calling and texting features, as well as the ability to send voice messages, videos, and photos across devices. The app works on the best Android devices and iPhones and can be installed on a desktop or laptop. With added simplicity, it’s tempting to send and receive countless images and videos, which take up space on your phone. While you can delete media conversation by conversation, this isn’t straightforward, as you need to go through every discussion on your phone.

There’s another way to access your media gallery and hidden folders on your phone to get rid of unwanted media. And, if you use WhatsApp on your computer, there’s a way to clean up the data it stores locally. Here’s how to clean it all up.

Unless you’ve changed your WhatsApp settings, the media you receive from other people is automatically saved in your phone’s gallery under the WhatsApp folder. It’s easy to access it and clean it up.

1. Open your phone’s gallery or Photos app.
2. Look for the WhatsApp Images and WhatsApp Video folders or albums. If you don’t see them, they’re probably hidden, and we show you how to access them further down this post.
3. Select the pictures you want to remove and delete them. Otherwise, skip to the next section.
4. You may want to delete the WhatsApp Animated Gifs folder, which contains files you may not want to keep, especially not in your gallery.
5. In most cases, you’ll have to empty the trash to remove the media you deleted.

Depending on your WhatsApp settings, not all media you receive is saved in your phone’s gallery. This doesn’t mean the photos and videos aren’t saved on your phone. It means they’re hidden and not easily accessible. For instance, WhatsApp doesn’t make media from archived conversations visible in your device’s gallery but instead saves them in hidden folders.

Here’s how to access your WhatsApp media, including hidden photos and videos:

1. Open your phone’s file browser.
2. Navigate to your phone’s internal storage and access the folders under Android > com.whatsapp > WhatsApp > Media.
3. You’ll see the list of WhatsApp media you’ve sent and received, including audio, documents, stickers, voice notes, GIFs, videos, and images.
4. Under each folder, you’ll find the Private and Sent subfolders. The first subfolder stores media from archived conversations. The second subfolder groups what you’ve shared with others. These subfolders are hidden from your phone’s gallery, so you must access them from a file browser.

5. Select and delete the media and files you want to remove, then empty the trash.
6. If there’s nothing that you want to keep, delete the folders under Media or their subfolders. WhatsApp automatically creates them again when needed.
7. For added convenience, star the folders you want to clean up often to avoid looking for the WhatsApp media folder when you clean up your phone from unwanted data.

Clearing your cache

Although clearing your WhatsApp cache won’t remove the media, it helps the app run smoothly and deletes temporary files from your phone’s memory.

1. Open your phone’s Settings.
2. Tap Apps.
3. Scroll down and tap WhatsApp.
4. Tap Storage.

5. Tap Clear cache in the lower-right corner.

Free up space on your computer

Since WhatsApp can be installed on your computer, it saves files locally, which takes up space on your device. These files aren’t easily accessible on your Mac or PC and are automatically cleared after a while unless you manually download them. Still, when you need to free up space on your computer, deleting WhatsApp media might help.

The easiest way to remove these files is by logging out of WhatsApp if you’re using the desktop app. It only takes a few clicks:

1. Open the WhatsApp app on your computer.
2. Click on the arrow pointing downwards to the right of your profile picture.

3. Click Log Out.

This unlinks your computer from your WhatsApp account and removes the media stored on it. Next time you log in, the app restores your chats and doesn’t retrieve the media it had cached before the process.

Alternatively, you can uninstall the app if you don’t need it, which also removes the data it stored locally on your computer.

Free up plenty of storage space

The main reason to clean up your WhatsApp media, especially from hidden folders since their content is not visible in your phone’s gallery, is the ability to get rid of useless files that take up space on your phone. Even though WhatsApp compresses images, backups contain these images and videos. Using Google Drive to sync your backups takes up space on the cloud for data you don’t need or want to keep. If you decide to switch, these useless files will be restored on a new device, meaning they’ll take up space on your new handset.

It’s useful to manually remove these files once in a while to free up space on your current device and make your backups lighter and faster. A bonus to removing these files is looking through old memories and putting a smile on your face. If you don’t care much about them, you can delete the folders from the get-go without going through them one by one.

To make the most out of your WhatsApp experience, check out our WhatsApp tips and tricks and take complete control of what you do with the app.