If you’re like us, you’ve got something like 200,000 photos stored on your phone, dating back to when the Sumarians first conquered Babylon. Or close. Well let’s just say you’ve got a lot of snaps, and the problem is you’re running out of space to add more. Sure you could delete some (gasp!) or swap memory cards, but that means losing your archive. But now there’s a better way which gives you more free space, for free.

Crunch is a very clever free app for iPhone and Android, which reduces the size of your photos in situ, and thus gives you more space to add an even greater number of selfies of you and the cat. What a bargain! The software compresses the images up to 6x without losing quality, and we can vouch that it works, since we’ve been using it for a few weeks now.

The app is fire and forget, just install it, agree to the auto crunching and off it goes, reducing image file size in the background. You’ll want to switch it off if you intend to do any large size photo printing, but apart from that it’s a great bit of code. The app also compresses video by up to 40%, and if you’re worried about your photos you can select to have the originals backed up to a cloud service before they’re compressed on the handset.

The whole thing works really well, and it’s a winner all round. And when you think about it, do you really need those huge photo files on your phone? Most of the time we just show our photos on the small screen, which makes it ridiculously wasteful to keep large photo files anyway.

Available for iPhone and Android.