Automatically downloading photos from WhatsApp can bring quite a few problems. Here’s how to disable the feature on iPhone and Android
Who said that WhatsApp is only useful for exchanging messages? The messaging platform, in fact, can also be used to privately share photos and videos with your contacts. But, as more and more multimedia content is exchanged between contacts, automatic photo downloading on WhatsApp can become a problem.
Photos and videos, in fact, take up a lot of memory on your smartphone and soon you may find yourself running out of space on your phone because of the photos automatically downloaded by WhatsApp. In addition, if the automatic download is active even with data connection, the impact of WhatsApp on our phone plan could be considerable. Last but not least, downloading photos consumes a lot of battery power. How to disable automatic downloading on WhatsApp?
Blocking automatic photo downloading on WhatsApp for iOS
To prevent WhatsApp from downloading photos and videos on iOS devices without our consent we need to open the app, click on Settings in the bottom bar and then Data Usage > Photos and select the “Never” option. The other options available are to download photos always or only when we are covered by Wi-Fi connection.
If our priority is free space on the smartphone “Never” is the setting to be preferred: you can still tap on the single photo within the WhatsApp chat and view it. The exact same procedure is also valid to manage the automatic download of audio, video and documents.
Block automatic photo download on WhatsApp for Android
The procedure to block the automatic download of photos in WhatsApp for Android is a bit different. We must always go to Settings from the top right menu and then to Data Usage and Storage.
Here we will find the Automatic Download section with three options to change: “When using the mobile network”, “When connected via Wi-Fi” and “When roaming”. For each of them we can choose what to download: photos, audio, video, documents. If we uncheck everything, WhatsApp will not download anything automatically.
Also in this case, if our priority is to save space on the device, then it will be useful to disable the download of photos, videos, audio and documents with any type of connection. If, on the other hand, our priority is to save the data of the phone plan, then we can disable the automatic ddownload only in case of cellular and roaming connection and leave it active when we are covered by Wi-Fi.