Simple Phone Storage Calculator For 2026

What The Phone Storage Calculator Works Out

• That's room for: free gigabytes x 1,000 to get megabytes, divided by the typical size of one item. Modern compressed (HEIC) photos run 3-4 MB, so 64 GB holds about 18,000 of them; 4K video at roughly 350 MB a minute is the storage killer, with one minute equal to about 100 photos.
• Rules of thumb: 64 GB fills fast, 128 GB suits most people, 256 GB lets you shoot video freely. A phone sold as 128 GB offers about 110 GB usable once the operating system has taken its 10-20 GB.
• Custom size per item (advanced): overrides the dropdown's assumption with your own figure in megabytes, for example 2 MB for HEIC stills, 150 MB a minute for 4K at a higher-efficiency setting, or 10,000 MB for a specific game. Switching to "high efficiency" photo and video formats roughly halves file sizes for free.
• Time until full (advanced): the item count divided by how many you add per week, shown in weeks, months or years. Messaging apps' auto-saved media is usually the hidden extra: clear WhatsApp's media folder before buying a bigger phone.
• Added over the phone's life (advanced): items per week x 52 x years x size per item, so you can see whether your habit outgrows the free space before you would replace the phone anyway. UK owners now keep phones for about three years on average.
• Cloud plan over that time (advanced): the monthly cloud fee x 12 x years. UK pricing is typically GBP 0.99 for 50 GB, GBP 2.99 for 200 GB and GBP 8.99 for 2 TB a month, charged for as long as the photos live there.
• Bigger phone vs cloud (advanced): compares the one-off cost of the next storage tier (usually GBP 50-100 more) with the cloud fees over the years you keep the phone, and shows the break-even in months. The heavy shooter does well buying big; the light user does well buying small and syncing; the bigger tier also recovers part of its cost at resale.
• Back up first: whichever route wins, a full phone is one drop away from being an empty one. Delete by category (videos and screen recordings first, burst duplicates second, app caches third), and never trust a "free up space" feature to know which copy of a photo is the only one.