When Apple first announced iCloud in 2011, the 5GB of free storage the company offered seemed like a lot of space that most people would never use. Over the past few years, however, the file sizes of smartphone photos and videos have grown dramatically. At the same time, Apple announced a slew of new products that share the same iCloud space.

You can buy more iCloud space or use one of the best cloud storage solutions as an alternative. The first step, however, is to get rid of your old files and slim down your existing iCloud storage. This guide offers five simple tips you can use to free up iCloud space.

Before you start down the path of deleting files from iCloud, we recommend that you identify the types of files that are taking up the most space. Go to iCloud from your device's Settings app and select "Manage Storage."

At the top of the screen you will see a bar graph showing the types of files that are filling up your available iCloud space. For most Apple users, backups, photos, and messages can take up more than half of the storage space. Scroll down to see a detailed list of installed apps and how much iCloud storage each is using.

This will tell you what changes you can make to your iCloud storage to free up the most space.

Device backups are a common cause of iCloud storage filling up. It is quite possible that you had an old iPhone backup set to automatically upload to the cloud, but did not delete that file. Years later, there is little chance that you will need to access that backup in the future, yet it is still occupying valuable storage space.

To delete these files, open iCloud from the Settings app (iOS) or the System Preferences app (MacOS). Then click or tap "Manage Backups" to see all the backups currently stored in your iCloud account. Delete any unwanted backups to free up storage space immediately.

While you are here, it is also a good idea to check what individual apps are backing up to your iCloud account. Some, like the Photos app, may be important to copy to the cloud. However, you do not need to save the data for every app on your device. To turn off app backup, simply tap the status bar to change it from green to gray.

Individual text messages or iChat threads may only be a few kilobytes each. However, if you have been using your iPhone for many years, you may have over a gigabyte of old messages stored in your iCloud account. If you send a lot of emojis or photos, the total of those messages could be even larger.

To save space, go to your device's Messages app. From here, you can delete individual messages or entire conversations. Note that deleting a message on one device will delete it from all your Apple devices.

You can also delete only attachments, which tend to take up a disproportionate amount of storage space. From a conversation, tap the contact's name, then tap the Info button. Select View All Photos and select all the photos you want to delete.

As with messages, email attachments can take up a huge amount of space-especially if your iCloud account stores several years' worth of email. iCloud Mail has an easy way to view email with attachments by size. 23]

Open iCloud Mail and choose View > Sort by Attachments. With a few clicks, you can delete all emails with attachments. If you do not want to delete that many emails, select a specific cutoff, such as 15 MB, and delete all emails with attachments larger than that size.

Your Photo Library is likely taking up the majority of the space in your iCloud account. After all, the cameras on Apple devices are incredibly high resolution, and more and more people are shooting video clips in addition to photos. If you're not careful about managing your library, you can easily end up with hundreds of gigabytes of media files in the cloud.

Unfortunately, there is no automatic way to find bad photos in your iCloud library. It is up to you to search through your albums and delete unwanted photos. If you have videos stored in the cloud, we recommend cropping only the videos you want to keep for posterity.

You will notice that deleting photos does not immediately change your iCloud storage space. This is because even if you throw them in the trash, the photos and videos are not completely deleted, but sent to your "Recently Deleted Albums." To add more space to your Cloud account, go to "Recently Deleted Albums" and delete all files from there.

There are a few things you can do to ensure that your photo storage does not overflow in the future. For example, delete photos as soon as you take them. If you need to tap the camera five times to get the perfect selfie, delete the four unwanted photos immediately. Similarly, for videos, crop only the parts you want to keep and delete any leftover shots.

You can also move old albums offline if you don't need to access them across devices on demand. Moving data to an external hard drive will free up iCloud storage space and save money on cloud storage in the long run.

iCloud Drive is where Apple stores copies of all other types of files, including documents, PDFs, and application files. Over time, the Drive's storage space can fill up with clutter, like messages, emails, and photo libraries.

Cleaning up iCloud Drive can be done on an iPhone or iPad, but it is easiest to do from a computer; on a Mac, simply head to the iCloud Drive folder in the Finder. You can then sort the files by size, type, and creation date, and delete anything you don't need.

With files from all parts of the Apple ecosystem filtering into iCloud, it's easy to see how storage space can fill up quickly. Spending a few minutes to clean out your storage space from time to time can help free up space. With the following five tips, you can easily tackle the most common causes of a full iCloud account.

Looking for an alternative to iCloud? Find the best cloud storage solution.