![]() ![]() To ensure the longevity of not just my phone but those of my parents, aunts and uncles, I had to back up the media somewhere safe on my NAS and delete the media from the WhatsApp folder on all phones.Īt the same time, I had to ensure that they can be viewed without too much inconvenience so I decided to host an instance of Photoview for my family to browse their own WhatsApp media backup. In my case, it was my grandfather, who has recently succumbed to COVID-19 in August 2021, and I'd like to keep all of my family's moments with him, recorded in WhatsApp, for as long as I live and perhaps one day peruse it with my children and speak of his strength and bravery. This becomes especially important if group chats contain photos of videos of loved ones who have passed on. ![]() ![]() Backing up to free storageĪs much as I'd like to discard my WhatsApp media, life as we know it has become so intertwined with WhatsApp that discarding it would be akin to discarding a decade of precious moments with my family and friends. The next largest app is Google at 0.9GB, occupying over 19 times less space, other apps are even smaller than that! For a budget smartphone with around 32GB of storage available, this is pretty much a death sentence. I'm sure you may have experienced at least once where your phone runs out of storage space and you check what's taking so much storage, you find something like the following: In case you're wondering, this list of apps is sorted in descending order of storage utilizationĭespite the best of my efforts at trying to be prudent with my WhatsApp media downloads, WhatsApp still takes up 18GB of storage. No amount of positivity will make up for the loss of storage for this Storage woes Particularly detestable are "Good Morning" images that are sent by the same individuals in multiple group chats, resulting in media duplication and serves no purpose other than to take up precious storage space on my phone and thereby shortening its effective lifespan. The Age of MediaĪs much as I'd like to praise WhatsApp for their pivotal role in changing the way we connect with others, WhatsApp has also been the bane of all smartphones, especially so in the last few years as people generated more and more media per day. With the advent of WhatsApp and other cross-platform multimedia instant messaging services, it became so easy to send photos, videos, and audio to someone else that we've forgotten how annoying it was to do so just slightly over a decade ago. Even today, it costs a whopping S$0.35 (US$0.26) to send a single MMS in Singapore. On mobile we had the SMS (Short Message Service) and later on, the notoriously expensive MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). I recall, with much amusement, having to rush home right after school so that I can continue chatting with my friends on my computer. To be fair, multimedia instant messaging was already available on PCs as early as 1998 with the likes of Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. WhatsApp ushered the world into the age of cross-platform multimedia instant messaging back in January 2009. ![]()
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