WhatsApp: New feature lets you free up storage by deleting messages you don't care about

Conversations, particularly group chats, often get clogged up with silly multimedia attachments

WhatsApp and Facebook messenger icons are seen on an iPhone in Manchester , Britain March 27, 2017 (Reuters)

WhatsApp is making it easier for you to free up space on your phone without deleting everything and losing messages you care about.

The app has built a new storage management section into its Settings menu on Android, allowing you to mass-delete specific types of messages from conversations, while saving others.

Conversations, particularly group chats, often get clogged up with silly multimedia attachments you'll never look at again, which can eat into your handset’s storage.

This WhatsApp update, which was first spotted by Android Police, makes it easier to get that storage space back.

In the Android app, tapping Settings, Data and Storage Usage and Storage Usage will take you to a list of your conversations, ranked by how much space they’re taking up on your phone.

You can touch any of these conversations to see a detailed breakdown of all of the different types of messages – texts, images, GIFs, videos, audio, documents, locations, contacts – in the conversation.

As well as displaying exactly how many of these message types have been exchanged, the screen also shows you how much space each type of message is using up.

Tapping on the Manage Messages button at the bottom of the screen lets you choose a particular section – or several of them – and delete the messages.

You can get rid of all of the video messages in a conversation, for instance, but keep everything else. On the other hand, you can also delete all of the messages in a conversation apart from videos.

Similar functionality has been available on iOS for some time, but it’s a boost for Android users.

The feature is currently only available on the beta version of WhatsApp, but that’s easy to access. Just follow this link and sign up.