When your phone’s internal storage starts to get full, it can be frustrating. Things slow down, apps won’t install, and in some cases, you can’t even download anything. Fortunately, Samsung has a built-in way to help users see detailed information about what is taking up space, and also provides a simple way of deleting unwanted items.
This tool is called “Smart Manager,” and it’s available for the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge+, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S7, and Galaxy S7 Edge. It actually does a few other things aside from storage management, though the usefulness of those other features is questionable at best. The real value to this feature is undoubtedly the storage tools, though it’s probably worth at least exploring the other options once you’ve familiarized yourself with the app.
The first thing you’ll want to do is jump into the Settings menu by pulling down the notification shade and tapping the cog icon.
Once in the Settings menu, scroll down until you see “Smart Manager.” Tap that.
You’ll be presented with four options: Battery, Storage, RAM, and Device security. Select “Storage.”
This is where things start to get fun. The phone will take a few minutes to analyze the built-in storage and provide a graph with how much storage is used. Underneath that are two options: “Unnecessary data” and “User data.”
If you want to see details of what’s taking up space, go ahead and tap the “Detail” option beside the graph at the top. The system will once again take a bit of time to analyze what’s going on, then break it down into a series of narrower categories: Total, Available, System, Used, Other, and Cached. You can’t manipulate the first three in any way, but tapping on “Used” will give an even more granular breakdown of where storage space is being used: Apps, Pictures/Videos, and Audio. While you can use this section to navigate through each category and uninstall apps or delete files, there are a few things you should probably do first, so we’ll come back to this in a few minutes.
Back out to the main app screen. The second option here is “Unnecessary data,” which is exactly it sounds like: trash. Cached files, residual files, and things of that nature. The system decides what is going to get canned here, and if you go ahead and tap the “Delete” button, it’ll do its thing. I wouldn’t worry too much about it removing useful stuff, because this is all pretty basic.
A nice little animation will pop up as it deletes files, quickly showing what it’s removing. Like I said earlier, it’s just a bunch of cache files (but, surprisingly, not all of them).
In fact, if you want to remove all cache files, jump back into Storage details, then tap the “Cached data” section. As you can see in the screenshot below, my device still has 496MB of cached files. When you tap on “Cached data,” a popup will appear letting you know that this will clear all cached data for all apps. That’s fine—go ahead and tap “Delete.”
The system will re-analyze storage and give you the new numbers. Cached data should be very low at this point—mine is 36 KB.
Lastly, you can check the “User data” section of the main screen. This will break down everything user-generated on your phone: Images, Video, Audio, Apps, and Documents. Tapping each section will show you everything that falls into that particular category and give you the option to multi-select files for deletion. There’s also an “All” option at the top if you just want to get rid of everything.
It’s worth mentioning that when you start manually deleting files you’ll need to take your time and pat attention to what you’re doing—once you delete a file, it’s gone. You’re not getting it back! But hopefully when you’re done, you’ll have a lot more free space on your device.