WhatsApp, the famous Facebook-owned instant messaging app, with over 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide (in India they are 200 million!) has reached another record, and it seems that nothing is going to stop its growing popularity. And it is easy to understand the reasons of its success.
First of all WhatsApp is completely free, then it allows you to chat with your contacts, make phone calls and share messages, music, pictures, videos and much more. And, as we said, all for free. However, there are some options that some users don’t appreciate very much, especially because they can take up much space of your storage data. WhatsApp in fact downloads automatically all the media files that you receive such as videos, pictures and GIFs. Today we are going to see how you can avoid saving them automatically on your device.
If you have an Android device
If you use WhatsApp with Android devices, follow these simple steps to stop auto downloading and saving pictures, videos and other media. After you have opened the app, from the main windows, tap: the three vertical dots on the top right > Settings > Chat settings > Media auto-download. Now you will see three options: When using cellular data, When connected on Wi-Fi and When roaming.
In order to disable the automatic download, you need to tap each one of them and disable the auto-downloads by unchecking the three options (Images, Audio and Video). Furthermore, you can stop viewing unwanted photos on your phone’s Gallery App. That’s how you can do it: first of all download Quickpic and open the app, go to the WhatsApp media folders > Internal Storage (sometimes it is called sdcard0) > Long-press the WhatsApp Images folder and make sure that it is selected.
Follow the same procedure with the WhatsApp Video and WhatsApp Audio folders. At this point you can tap the three dots icon on the top-right > Hide. In this way the Gallery app doesn’t show them. Obviously you will still be able to view these images and videos within WhatsApp and through any apps that let you view hidden folders.
If you have an iPhone device
With iPhone devices, you can do all the above via the Settings menu. So, open WhatsApp and tap the Settings button you see on the bottom-right, then tap on Data and Storage Usage. This menu will display the Media Auto-Download option on top. At this point you just have to select the Never option for photos, audio and videos. And that’s the great surprise: following these steps only the files you choose to download manually will show on your phone.
Furthermore, you will also be able to choose to stop videos and photos from appearing on the phone’s Camera Roll. That’s how you can do it. Go to Chats > Save to Camera Roll and turn it to off.