Many would proudly say, “Hey, I am a fan of TikTok,” and rightly so, considering the infinite content, ease of socializing, wide user base, and some decent advertising opportunities that lay at the core of why it got this big in the first place.
But there’s one thing no one likes, and that is the excessive storage usage of TikTok.
TikTok, with its extensive video database and interactive capabilities, can consume large portions of storage on your device in no time. From readings in megabytes initially to tens of gigabytes after a few weeks, this is really not ideal.
Why Does TikTok Use Up That Much Space?
A number of reasons lie at the root of this space-eating monster. They include:
- High-Resolution Videos
- Drafts: TikTok ensures that the drafts are saved locally on your device. While this is great, it ensures that your creations are not uploaded until you are sure they are ready. Unfortunately, it also means that the more drafts you create, the greater the storage space you consume. The platform itself applies extreme video compression, so it tries to reduce the file sizes of videos. High-resolution videos, however, can remain quite big even with compression, let alone those shot in 4K or Full HD quality.
- Caching: TikTok locally caches the videos to speed up their playback and save data. That means even when you view a video once, it could still end up on your device.
- Different Formats for Content
- Music and Effects: An extensive library of music, sound effects, and filters can also increase the size of videos downloaded from TikTok.
- GIFs and Stickers: The large number of supported GIFs and stickers also contribute to growing storage consumption.
- User Behavior
- Offline Mode: Videos downloaded for offline mode watching will directly increase your storage consumption.
- History: TikTok saves the history of what you have watched in the cache of the application itself inside your device. The more you view videos, the greater your cache size will expand.
- App Updates and Cache
- Regular Updates: TikTok makes frequent updates and releases new features with enhancements that take up a lot of extra storage.
- Cache: to improve performance, temporary information is stored in the in-app cache. The cache grows over time and may take up significant space.
How to Manage TikTok Storage
The following are the steps you need to carry out to manage the storage consumption by TikTok:
- Clear Cache and User Data: You can free up your valuable space by clearing the cache and user data of your app periodically. First, go to your phone’s settings, find the section titled “Apps,” scroll down to locate TikTok, tap “Storage,” and click “Clear Data.” This action will remove data created by the app, but it won’t remove the app itself.
- Delete Unwanted Videos: Delete the videos you no longer need to free up space. These include videos that have been downloaded and the drafts which you do not want to post.
- Uninstall and Reinstall: If these are not enough, then your last hope may be the old uninstall/reinstall magic. It will allow you to reboot with a fresh start.
Conclusion
Knowing what causes TikTok to use so much storage space and putting into practice some management strategies that we have discussed here will help tune your device’s storage. You can then make full use of this platform, never at the cost of your device’s performance. You’re welcome.
