Once you complete the setup of WhatsApp Messenger and allow it to access your photos, it starts saving all incoming photos and videos to the Photos app. If you’re tired of this, we’ll show you how to stop WhatsApp Messenger from saving images to your iPhone.
Table of Contents
Why should you stop WhatsApp Messenger from saving media on iPhone?
1. Photos take up twice as much storage
When you receive a photo or video on WhatsApp, one copy of it is stored in the Photos app and another copy is stored inside the WhatsApp app. This means that photos and videos take up twice as much memory.
Even if you delete an image or photo saved from WhatsApp in the Photos app, it will still be displayed in the messenger chat. Just click the name of the chat at the top of the screen and select “Media, links and documents”. There will be a deleted photo or video.
2. It clutters the Photos app
WhatsApp automatically downloads all received media to the Photos app. It is stored in the WhatsApp album, and also appears in recent and all photos and videos. It turns out that this media clogs both local photo storage and iCloud Photos. If you text a lot on WhatsApp, the Photos app will quickly turn into a mess.
3. Privacy of personal photos
You can receive personal photos and videos on WhatsApp. You probably don’t want them to show up in your Photos app.
How to prevent WhatsApp Messenger from saving media in Photos
1) In the WhatsApp messenger, select the “Settings” tab.
2) Here select “Chats”.
3) Turn off the option “To film”.
How not to save media from a specific chat
1) Open a personal or group chat in WhatsApp.
2) At the top, click the name of the chat.
3) Select the “To film” section, and then “Never”.
How to prevent WhatsApp Messenger from accessing the Photos app
You can also completely prevent WhatsApp messenger from accessing the Photos app so that it can never save media to your iPhone.
You will also not be able to send photos and videos through chats. It will only be possible to share a photo or video on WhatsApp by tapping the export icon in the Photos app.
1) Open the Settings app and select Privacy.
2) Here select “Photo”.
3) Scroll down and click WhatsApp.
4 ) Select No.
How to manually save images
Even after you have turned off automatic saving of media from WhatsApp, you can save photos and videos manually.
1) Open a WhatsApp chat.
2) Select the desired image, click the export icon and select Save.
3) If you want to save several images at once, click the name of the chat at the top and select “Media, links and documents” > “Select” > check the desired photos > export icon > “Save [number] images”.
This method will not work if you have blocked WhatsApp from accessing the Photos app.
If you need to paste the resulting image into a document, note or somewhere else, you can copy it from WhatsApp.
That’s all folks. Now you know how to prevent the messenger from saving photos and videos to your iPhone and clogging up the memory.
