In the last few days, I’ve been getting messages on my phone that I’ve run out of storage. I went through and got rid of apps I no longer use and put others in the cloud. That helped for a while but I started to get the message again. My iPhone usage shows that podcasts are taking up the bulk of my storage. I went through my library and deleted podcasts that I’m no longer interested in. Then I noticed how all of the podcasts I listen to have loads of downloaded episodes. I started deleting them and then really noticed my storage shaping up. The problem is there are so many and the only way I can figure out how to delete them is one at a time - Go to Library, Episodes, Click on an episode, Remove, Remove Download or Delete from Library…for each one. I’ve googled this and can’t seem to find any instructions on how to delete them easily and quickly. I was hoping I could just click edit and then tap all of them I want to delete and they’d disappear all at once. I have years of episodes clogging things up.
Nope. Looks like they removed the bulk edit feature. You can, however, do a full-length swipe to the left to delete the episode, which is slightly quicker.
Yeah, I’m hating this updating to the podcasting. Jeez, just give me a frickin’ chronological order and let me delete them.
AFAIK @Noelq is correct - you have to swipe them individually to the left and then tap delete.
As an FYI - (You may be doing this) to make it easier to manage memory, you can see a summary of every app and how much memory space it’s using.
Settings>General>iPhone Storage
Then give it a few seconds to calculate, and if you scroll you will see all your apps ranked by memory usage.
Podcasts were also a huge issue for me. Like you, I went through and deleted podcasts but what has also helped a lot is I changed my Podcast settings. It was auto downloading all new episodes and not deleting them after I listened. Over time they built up quite a bit. My settings now are to manually download new episodes and auto-delete after I listen to them.
The other big memory pig on iPhones is iMessage. The specific issue is not the messages themselves, but photos, videos, GIFs attachments. If you send someone a photo from your photo library it creates a duplicate of that in your iMessage. If someone sends you a photo it stays in iMessage until it is deleted. Again, they really add up over time.
I keep messages forever, but when I have downtime (sitting waiting for an appointment etc.) I go through iMessage and manually delete attachments or save them to Photos if I want to keep them. Unfortunately I don’t believe there’s a way you can save only the messages but not the attachments.
That’s what I did - check the iPhone storage in Settings. That’s how I found out that the podcasts were the big culprit.
I just changed my Podcast setting to “manually download”. It shows that it’s set to “delete played episodes”, but I don’t think that’s what it’s doing.
Make you complete the episodes to 100%, (fast forward to the end or slide your finger along the dot) even if you leave 20 seconds on it, it doesn’t delete.