Phone storage full again... is it the photos of the herons or something else??

so my phone keeps popping up that little message saying storage is almost full... and I swear I deleted a bunch of stuff last week!! Tyler was over Sunday and he said it's probably all the videos I take at the retention pond but most of them are only a minute or two... maybe three if the heron is doing something interesting lol... ngl he started to show me where the settings are but then his mom called him to the car so I never got the rest

I did find a folder that says "Recently Deleted" and it had like 400 pictures in it so are those still taking up room even though I already deleted them?? That seems a little sneaky to me and there's another thing called "Other" that's using a ton of space and I have no idea what's even in there!! I don't want to pay for the cloud thing every month if I don't have to... I'm already paying for enough subscriptions just to watch Dateline lol

Is there an easy way to see what's actually filling it up?? It's an iPhone, not sure which number, maybe a couple years old... any help is appreciated!! Just my two cents well, more like my two questions!!

yeah thats probably it. stuff in Recently Deleted still takes up space for 30 days, so empty it if youve already deleted things https://support.apple.com/en-us/108927

and a 2 or 3 minute clip isnt small. if your camera is set to 4K at 60fps thats roughly 400MB a minute, so like 15 heron videos can be several GB. go to Settings > Camera > Record Video and drop it to 1080p at 30. still looks fine for birds standing in a pond lol

if you want to check whats actually eating teh space,

also check the recently deleted album, those herons hang around for 30 days after you delete them freed up like 6GB on mine once i actually emptied it. and if you still have message attachments set to keep forever, thats usually the other big one

my watch has never once told me its storage was full, just saying...

lol ok the watch thing is fair... my watch mostly just reminds me to stand up and then i ignore it!! like, for me it was offline podcast downloads. i had like 40 episodes of some show about meteor showers that i forgot i even subscribed to... too many hobbies, not enough gigabytes. also the Draconids peak around now, so if the herons ever take a break, go look up!!

...hobbies, not enough gigabytes also the Draconids peak around now, so...

a watch that nags you to stand up and then you ignore it... ngl mine just tells time and doesnt judge me, which is sort of the whole point. 40 episodes about meteor showers is a lot though, what happens when one shows up and the episode is already outdated...

...about meteor showers that i forgot i...

ugh the stand reminder mine went off once while i was standing in line at the DMV for like 40 minutes and i took it personally

wait, a whole show about meteor showers?? how many episodes can that even be before they're just describing the same rocks falling