WhatsApp is a pretty fantastic messaging app, to the extent it has become the preferred contact app of choice for millions, with literally over a billion people across the world using the app.
However, nothing is perfect, and WhatsApp is not without its quirks and foibles.
One of the main ones which rubs people up the wrong way is that, by default, WhatsApp will download and store every picture, gif, audio recording, and video file sent and recevied within the application.
On the one hand, this is great, because it means if you want to re-send that meme from a while back, you can just dive into what the app has saved.
On the other, it can be a damn nuisance because it can quickly take up a fair bit of storage space on your phone, on top of cluttering up your gallery and folders.
Below we explain how you can toggle this feature off and on, so you can control whether WhatsApp is saving media files or not.
How To Stop WhatsApp Saving Photos, Videos & Other Media
- Open WhatsApp so that you're in the main screen with a list of ongoing conversations.
- Tap the icon with three dots in the top right.
- Tap "Settings".
- Tap "Data and storage use".
- Under "Media auto-download" you'll see three sub-categories: "When using mobile data", "When connected on Wi-Fi", and "When roaming".
- On all three categories you can tap and select from a series of checkboxes which file types you want to allow for that connection type - if you don't want to allow any, de-select all of them for each category.
- Note also that at the bottom there is "Media visibility" which you can also check or un-check. This toggles whether or not media downloaded inside WhatsApp will be visible in your galleries and folders outside the app.
