Planning a phone's storage
Start from the capacity on the box, take off what the system and your apps already use, and share out the rest. Phone makers count in decimal, so a 128 GB phone has 128 billion bytes. iOS shows its own use under Settings › General › iPhone Storage; Android shows it under Settings › Storage. On most phones the system and preinstalled apps take somewhere between 15 and 40 GB (our estimate; it varies by model and version).
Video is what fills phones. A minute of 4K at 60 fps is about 400 MB on an iPhone, as much as 200 HEIF photos. Switching the camera to 1080p or 4K at 30 fps is the biggest single saving. Next comes letting a cloud library keep full-size originals and leave smaller copies on the phone.
Free space and what it holds
| Phone | Free | HEIF photos | JPEG photos | iPhone 4K30 | iPhone 4K60 | AAC songs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 64 GB | 34 GB | 17,000 | 9,714 | 200 min | 85 min | 5,059 |
| 128 GB | 98 GB | 49,000 | 28,000 | 576 min | 245 min | 14,583 |
| 256 GB | 226 GB | 113,000 | 64,571 | 1,329 min | 565 min | 33,630 |
| 512 GB | 482 GB | 241,000 | 137,714 | 2,835 min | 1,205 min | 71,726 |
| 1 TB | 970 GB | 485,000 | 277,142 | 5,706 min | 2,425 min | 144,345 |
Other calculators
How much fits
Photos, songs, hours of video or documents on any card, drive or phone.
Download time
Any file size at any connection speed, with real-world overhead.
GB vs GiB
Decimal vs binary units, and why a 1 TB drive shows 931 GB.
Video file size
File size from bitrate and length, or the bitrate a size allows.
Cloud backup time
How long the first full upload (seeding) takes on your upload speed.
Data cap planner
How much Netflix, YouTube, Spotify or Zoom fits in a monthly cap.
Compression ratio
Ratios vs percentages, and a live gzip test on your own text.