Avoid junk on WhatsApp: How to prevent photos or videos from being downloaded

It can not only be a problem for the storage of your mobile phone But those cat videos that your friends send in different chats pose a risk to your smartphone because they are continually forwarded and may have malware that infects us or steals our data. When it downloads automatically, you may have stopped looking at your phone for a couple of hours and when you return you will find five, six or seven potentially dangerous videos that have already been stored. Therefore, the recommendation is that you only download files from reliable senders and check to see if they have the “forwarded” or “forwarded many times” label.

Block downloads

WhatsApp downloads can be blocked so that no one downloads without your permission on either Android or iOS. This does not mean that you will not be able to see the content that your contacts send you, but that it will not be automatically saved in your phone’s memory unless you click on the download arrow or icon. With this, we manage to save only what we think interests us and we can avoid the typical “forwarded” videos in groups with many people who not only don’t like us, but may contain malware.

On Android

The steps to manage automatic downloads on Android are simple and we can choose if we want to block them with data, with WiFi or always.

• Open WhatsApp on your Android mobile phone
• Go to the settings by tapping on the three dots in the upper corner
• Go to the “Data and storage” option that we see in the menu
• Look for the second settings section “Download automatic”
• We will see three different options
  • Download with mobile data
  • Download with Wi-Fi
  • Data roaming
• Tap on any of these options
• We will see four options or boxes that we can check
  • Photos
  • Audio
  • Videos
  • Documents

We can mark the options we want within each section. That is, you can set WiFi to download photos and audios but not videos. Or you can choose to have mobile data Only audios are downloaded but no photos, videos or documents. We can repeat the process for mobile data, for WiFi and data roaming to choose what we want to download and what not.

When we have deactivated this option, the images or videos sent to us will appear with the thumbnail blurred and with a downward arrow icon as a download symbol. We simply tap on them to download them to our mobile phone and decide if we want to save them or not. But we will do it manually, one by one, and we will not run the risks mentioned in previous paragraphs.

On iOS

If you have an Apple brand mobile phone, we can also configure the different downloads so that you do not fill the memory with multimedia files that you are not interested in or that you do not need. The steps are practically the same as on Android and we simply have to go to the settings of the messaging application:

• Open WhatsApp on your iPhone
• Click on the “Settings” button in the lower right corner
• Go to the “Data and storage” section
• You will see four options
  • Photos
  • Audio
  • Videos
  • Documents
• Choose from each of them never download

The only difference in iOS compared to Android is that we will not choose what is downloaded with WiFi, data or roaming but the process is just the opposite. That is, we can open the different sections (photos, audio, videos…) and choose when we want them to download and when we don’t want them to.

Delete all files from a chat

If you did not have this activated until now and you have been accumulating meaningless memes or videos, we can delete them in one fell swoop. We can simply delete all files of the same type when we are in the chat and from the settings. For example, we can delete all videos from the group of friends in which there are only memes but not the rest of the videos received from WhatsApp. EITHER all your friend’s audio messages that doesn’t tell you anything in writing. We can select exactly what we want to delete if we have already configured the app to prevent automatic downloads. This way our mobile phone will be clean and ready.

This tool has changed in recent months and WhatsApp previously allowed us to filter according to the type of content we wanted to delete (as you see in the image) but currently all the files will be shown on a single screen and we must delete one by one or select all but we cannot select all the audios or select only the videos to delete them.

We must do it manually and the steps are as follows:

• Open the WhatsApp application
• Go to the three points in the upper right corner
• In the drop-down menu, choose “Settings”
• Look for the section “Storage and data”

Once here, we can see a series of settings but the first one we can see is “Manage storage” along with a number that tells us the number of megabytes and gigabytes that we have stored on the phone and that are due to WhatsApp content: photos , videos, audio files… Tap on “Manage storage” and the details of the data or some of the files that take up the most space in the application will appear. And, just below, we will see all the chats that we have active on WhatsApp and the number of megabytes that we have stored andIn each chat, whether individual or in a group.

For “clean” We can do all the contents of a conversation from here, tapping on it and marking what we want to send to the trash. This way we will free up space and get rid of photos and videos that will no longer be returned. download of automatically. Repeat the process in all chats.