Users of the acclaimed iPhone are discovering that their storage problems may have a silent culprit taking up space in their devices.

If your iPhone’s storage is filling up fast, it may possibly be because of the same reason.

However, fortunately for you, this problem is not difficult to solve.

Most people are already aware that photos and videos take up a lot of space in their iPhones, and many are fastidious in seeking alternate storage for storing pictures.

While you can clear out your storage by deleting duplicates or downloading them to another cloud storage service, have you wondered why your pictures and videos take up so much space in the first place?

Here’s why:

1. Your 4K setting

The hidden culprit taking up so much space in your iPhone is the 4K setting when you take a video.

This setting is available on iPhone 8 and later models.

Videos taken with this setting take up a shocking amount of space. For instance, a 60-second video filmed in the 4K setting takes up a whopping 475 MB, whereas a 10-minute 4K video can take up to 4 GB of storage.

2. RAW photos

This is the raw photo data your camera stores when you take a photo, without processing or compressing it.

While a compressed JPEG takes up about 1 MB of space, a RAW photo takes up 25 MB.

How do I turn it off?

To ensure your videos don’t take up so much space, turn the 4K setting off by going to Settings > Camera > Record Video.

A list of video quality options to record from will appear. In this list, the first three are in HD, while the last three are in 4K.

If you need saving storage, choose one of the first three HD options.

While the 4K setting gets you high-quality video, transferring the video off your device after recording is recommended.

To turn off the RAW photos setting, go to Settings > Camera > Formats, then toggle off Apple ProRAW.