How to free up more space for my 16GB iPhone 4S?

you can back up your photo first for free up some space before updating it

If you are using a 4S, you’re using a device that is multiple generations old, and it’s probably nearing the end if its useful life anyway. Your battery is about to die – it has about 50% of its original capacity. So rather than do much else, begin to look for a replacement Android phone.

Second, upload the pictures to the cloud (any cloud) – any service is OK.

Third, do a factory wipe. Dump all apps, and start over.

Personally I wouldn’t bother. The general consensus is the 4s isn’t fast enough to make ios8 usable and given that ios8 is designed to be used on much bigger screens than the 4s there is much reason to update anyway.

If you must it’s probably easier to update by connecting your phone to your pc and using iTunes as this requires much less free space on the device.

What?

I use a 4S all day everyday, I get about a day and a half of battery life, and it’s fairly fast with iOS8.

The best way to free up space is to first figure out what’s taking it. Go to Settings -> General -> Usage -> Manage Storage. Give it a second and it will tell you what programs specially are using what amount of space. Delete any that aren’t worth it, or that you don’t use anymore.

Once that’s done, it’s probably photos or music that take up the majority of your room. You can import/export both at any time to a computer and then back. So that’s easiest.

If you don’t have a computer you usually connect to, you can use any cloud storage in much the same way. iCloud comes built in, and gives 5GB for free, but Dropbox, Google drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive (15GB for free), or Amazon Prime’s new service all work much the same. Grab an app for one of those and back up your photos or music, delete enough for the update, and then you can put those items back on your phone if you’d like when you’re done.

I upgraded my 4S and it is working well.

I have a Mac and I sync my phone to my iTunes library. I back my phone up on my computer, and my music preferences are set to “fill available space”.

After backing things up, I reset my phone to factory settings. And then I went through the upgrade. The last step was restoring my photos and music to where they’d been before.

On my 4S, videos took up the most space. Mine were up to 1GB each!

Videos, music, and photos are usually the biggest occupiers.