My phone's storage is full mid-job — what is safe to clear?

A full phone on site is urgent but fixable. The one rule before anything else: the space must come from things that are not evidence.

Never do these — they destroy evidence

• Do not delete the app or reinstall it — that removes the app's photo store, which holds the working copy of every unsent photo (why we say never uninstall).
• Do not clear the app's data or storage from your phone's settings — on Android that is the same as deleting the store, without the app icon even changing.
• Do not delete Buildsnapper photos from your phone's gallery. The gallery copy is the full-resolution, location-tagged safety net; freeing space by purging it removes your fallback.
• Do not let a phone "cleaner" app decide. They target exactly the large media files your evidence is made of.

Safe places to find space, fastest first

1. Videos. They dwarf photos. A few minutes of personal video usually frees more than everything else combined.
2. Other apps' downloads — podcasts, offline maps, streaming apps' saved shows.
3. Messaging attachments — WhatsApp and similar keep every photo and video ever received; both platforms show the biggest conversations in the app's storage settings.
4. Apps you no longer use. Removing an unused game costs you nothing.
5. Inside Buildsnapper, only a report copy that was never sent is safe to remove. Deleting it frees its PDF and never touches photos. Leave sent reports alone: deleting one also takes it from your assessor, and the link in your email stops working (deleting a report).

Two messages that are not this problem

• "Project storage limit" inside the app is about the project's cloud record, not your phone's storage — nothing is lost, and the answer there is to contact support, not to delete anything (project storage limit).
• Photos showing blank or with a red cross is a display problem, not a space problem — the guidance is different and it matters (photos disappeared).

Once the pressure is off

Send any completed plots. Sending a report gets the evidence off the device and into your assessor's hands — it is the strongest backup there is (what is backed up where) — and once sent, the pressure of the phone being the only copy is gone.