With the arrival of the holidays, the annoying messages multiply through WhatsApp. Increase the number of memes, images and videos to congratulate the holidays or for those meetings and meals with friends. Our smartphone is filled with the typical images and videos of the times we live in, but you can avoid it. You will prevent it from being filled with useless garbage from people you haven’t spoken to in years and who only remember you during the month of December and you will avoid running the risk of malware among thousands of forwarded videos that are an open door for cybercriminals during these dates .
We use WhatsApp all year round and for practically everything, but there are dates when its use multiplies and it becomes the tool that everyone uses to congratulate holidays, to send messages on Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Eve. Surely it has happened to you on other occasions: dozens of forwarded videos, absurd memes, photos, congratulatory images and all kinds of content. They accumulate on your mobile phone and will make it full of things you don’t need or garbage that will make performance worse or even cause malware to enter. But you can avoid it.
How to configure
We can configure the instant messaging application so that the contents are not downloaded automatically or so that they are not stored. We can do it before the month of December arrives and the groups you have start to fill up with photos and videos that you are going to accumulate in the gallery. You choose what to download and only from people you consider trustworthy or to whom you feel like responding. The rest don’t.
WhatsApp allows us to access the settings to configure content downloads if we do not want them to be activated automatically on the mobile. The steps are simple and we can access the settings to ensure that this is the case.
- We open WhatsApp on our mobile phone
- We go to the upper right corner of the screen
- We touch on the three points in the upper right corner
- A drop-down menu will open with options
- Choose the “Settings” section and tap on it
- You will have entered the settings and you will see sections such as Account, Privacy…
- You must look for “Storage and data” among the different menus
Once we get here we will see that we can configure everything related to WhatsApp storage on our mobile phone. The space it occupies, the data usage or whether or not we want to activate a proxy. But at the bottom you will see the section that interests us and that we are going to have to activate before Christmas arrives: the automatic download of WhatsApp. There are three different options:
- Download with mobile data
- Download with Wi-Fi
- Data roaming
We touch on each of them and we will see that there are four options: photos, audio, videos and documents. We can mark the ones we want or unmark them and confirm with “ok”.
What is recommended? The best thing you can do is uncheck all of them in the three sections to avoid automatic downloading to your mobile phone. Does this mean that we will not receive photos and videos? No. You will continue to receive your brother-in-law’s Christmas videos, photos and memes, but you will decide whether to download them or not depending on who sends it or whether you are interested or not through the corresponding chat thumbnail. If you stop looking at your phone for five minutes, you will avoid ending up with a gallery full of videos that take up space and can pose a danger. In addition, whenever you want you can follow the same steps to activate automatic download again.
