In this article I show you how to move videos and/or photos from your WhatsApp internal storage on an Android phone to your SD card to free up space on your phones’ internal storage.
Issue
I was asked how to move videos, photos and/or files from a WhatsApp chat that by default are stored on an Android phones’ internal storage from the internal storage to an installed SD card. This is especially important for those who want to keep copies of their videos or photos, but they do not want them using up internal storage space on their phone or their phones internal storage is filling up.
Options
There are ways to move the media files from the WhatsApp application directory by loading third party tools like ES File Explorer and poking around in the application system directories/files using the 3rd party file manager, but I was asked for a more simplistic method to achieve this without having to manipulate the system files/directories. The following method shows you how to move the media files (videos / photos, etc) by simply using the default applications available on the phone. Here are the steps to move the media files from your WhatsApp application to an offline SD card. You will need two applications (both of which should be available on your phone).
- Files by Google
Steps
The steps are as follows:
- Launch WhatsApp and go to the conversation that has the videos or photos that you want to move.
- Open each video or photo separately and select the 3 dot menu in the top right and choose “Share”
- Now select the “Files by Google” app and save a copy of the file to downloads
- Now in Files by Google - go to the downloads directory - select the downloaded file and use the menu and choose “Move to” and select the SD Card (I place my files in a DCIM/WhatsApp directory).
- With the file now moved to the SD card, go back to the conversation in your WhatsApp application and delete the original file.
Follow these steps for all your media files and that will free up your internal storage space. The videos and photo files will now show up in your “photos” application but are located on the SD card instead of taking up valuable space on your phones internal storage.