How to clean the memory of the gallery on Xiaomi: step-by-step instructions

Owners of Xiaomi, Redmi and Poco smartphones face a critical shortage of free space sooner or later. The MIUI or HyperOS operating system begins to warn about filling up storage, and the camera refuses to take new photos or videos. The gallery often becomes the main “eater” of megabytes, accumulating thousands of pictures, screenshots and saved files from messengers. Solving the problem requires a comprehensive approach, since simply deleting photos does not always free up real memory.

In this article, we’ll take a look at all the effective cleaning techniques, from basic deletion to hidden system folders, learn how to find duplicates, clean cache, and use cloud services to unload your device. Properly organizing media files will not only restore your smartphone’s performance, but also save your important data from accidental loss when memory is overflowing.

Storage analysis and search for heavy files

Before you start taking a radical step, you need to understand what's taking up space. Android's built-in tools and MIUI shells allow you to analyze the contents of memory in detail. Go to the settings and find the partition responsible for the storage to see the visualization of the occupied space. Often, it turns out that a significant part of the volume is not occupied by personal photos, but by the cache of applications or forgotten downloads.

Xiaomi's standard Explorer or Files app has a built-in analyzer that automatically scans the device and sorts files by type and size. Pay attention to the categories Video and Apps, as short videos from social media can weigh more than hundreds of photos. Heavy files are often hidden in messenger folders, where all the content you see is automatically stored.

• 📂 Open the Explorer app and select the Analyzer tab".
• 📂 Go to Documents or Other to find forgotten archives.
• 📂 Check the Download folder where files from the browser accumulate.

Using third-party analysis tools can also be effective if standard tools are not enough, but beware: many cleaners consume resources and display ads. Xiaomi’s built-in functionality is usually enough for a competent diagnosis.

Use of built-in cleaning tool

Every Xiaomi smartphone has a Security system app preinstalled, and it's not just an antivirus, it's also a powerful memory-management combine, and the Cleanup feature in this app can find what's called junk, sketch cache, and residual files from remote programs, and running this feature is the first step you need to take before manually sorting photos.

The app also has a dedicated section for photo work, which can suggest removing blurry images, similar images or selfies with your eyes closed. The AI algorithm analyzes the contents of the gallery and tags candidates for removal, which greatly speeds up the process, eliminating the need to flip through thousands of thumbnails manually.

It's important to understand the difference between cache and important data. Cache is temporary files that speed up applications but can be recreated. Deletion is safe. However, deleting application data can reset all settings and logins. In the context of a gallery, it's the sketch cache that is cleared, which is useful if thumbnails are displayed incorrectly or take up abnormally much space.

⚠️ Before mass cleaning through system utilities, make sure your photos are synced to the cloud or copied to a computer. Automatic algorithms can sometimes mistakenly label important pictures as blurry or similar.

Removal of duplicates and similar photos

One of the main reasons for the gallery's bloating is that there are many copies of the same image, which is often when you're using instant messengers, where you save a photo several times, or when you're shooting a series, and on Android 11 and later, including the latest versions of HyperOS, you've got a native duplicate search feature that's integrated right into the gallery.

To access this feature, open the gallery, go to the Albums section and scroll down to the Duplicates category. The system will show groups of identical files. You can choose which copies to delete, leaving the original with the best quality or resolution, which allows you to safely free up gigabytes without risking losing important moments.

If the built-in tool doesn't find all the copies, you can use third-party apps that specialize in finding similar images, which use pixel comparison algorithms to find not only exact copies, but also slightly modified versions of the photo (for example, with a different filter or cropping), but installing additional software may be unnecessary if you are careful about sorting albums.

Working with Screenshots folder and saves from social networks

Screenshots folder and social media directories like Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram are the black holes in smartphone memory. Users often take screenshots of correspondence, tickets or instructions that are only valid for a couple of days but have been in a gallery for years. Automatically saving media from chat rooms turns a gallery into a dump of unnecessary pictures and videos.

It's recommended that you regularly, at least once a month, review these folders, and in the instant messenger settings, you can turn off auto-save media to the gallery, and then the files will be available inside the application, but they won't be in the overall album and indexed by the system, and this is one of the most effective ways to keep the gallery clean.

Xiaomi Explorer allows you to sort files by date of addition, which allows you to quickly find and delete everything that was downloaded in the last week, often it turns out that half of the new files are advertising images from channels or statuses that you do not need.

• 📱 Open the settings. WhatsApp/Telegram and find the item "Data and storage".
• 📱 Turn off the option "Save in Gallery" or "Media visibility".
• 📱 Manually remove old media folders from internal chats.

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Set up automatic cleaning in Telegram: go to Settings → Data and Memory → Memory Use → Media Auto-Delete and set a 3 day or 1 week deadline. This will save you hours of manual cleaning.

Cleaning Hidden Folders and Cache Sketches.thumbnails

Deep inside the Android file system, there's a hidden folder called.thumbnails that often grows to incredible sizes, stores thumbnails of every photo and video you've ever viewed, and even if you delete the original, its ghost thumbnail can stay in the system, taking up space, and it can be as big as a few gigabytes.

To get to it, you'll need a file manager with access to hidden files (turn this option on in the Explorer settings). The path usually looks like: Internal Storage → DCIM →.thumbnails. Inside you'll see files with or without the.jpg extension that weigh a lot. They can be safely deleted.

There is also a way to create a "blocker" that you can delete the contents of the.thumbnails folder, and then create a text file there and call it.thumbnails (without extension), which will prevent the system from creating a new thumbnail folder, although this method does not always work consistently in new versions of Android.

⚠️ Warning: Deleting the.thumbnails folder is safe, but after that, the gallery can work slowly when it first opens until it regenerates all the thumbnails.

Sync with Mi Cloud and Google Photos

The most civilized way to solve the memory problem is to move the archive to the cloud. Mi Cloud service is deeply integrated into Xiaomi system. By enabling gallery synchronization, you can activate the "Free Space" function. Once the photo is successfully uploaded to the cloud, the originals are automatically deleted from the device, leaving only thumbnails.

The alternative is Google Photos. It can also back up and clear the memory of a device with a single button. The advantage of cloud services is that your photos are accessible from any device, even if your phone gets lost or broken. Cloud storage is not just a way to free up space, but it is also a way to insure your data.

However, it is worth considering the cost of a subscription if a free limit of 15 GB (Google) or 5 GB (Xiaomi) is not enough for you. For most users, the basic tariff is enough to store thousands of photos in a compressed but high-quality format. Full quality requires more space, but for ordinary photos from the phone the difference is often invisible.

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Using cloud sync with auto-delete local copies is the only way to ensure that the gallery never overflows again, with access to the Internet.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)