Here is a list of the first things I do when I get a hold of somebody’s iPhone or iPad when they are looking for advice on how to set up their iOS devices.  After completing the following you should have a better experience with your iOS device.

1. Upgrade to a paid iCloud storage plan.
   
   The free 5GB storage option is nice when you get started, but after you have lots of photos on your phone OR have two devices this space runs out quickly and will give you the dreaded “Unable to back up your device because you don’t have enough iCloud storage.”  Apple recently revised their storage tier pricing so you can get 50GB of storage for $0.99 per month (less than $12 per year).  This space can be used to store all sorts of things, but most people will use it for the back up of their devices and for their photos.
   
   To upgrade your storage plan just do the following:
   - Go to the Settings app
   - Navigate to the iCloud settings
   - Tap “Storage” setting
   - Tap “Change Storage Plan”
   - Tap the storage plan of your choice and tap Buy
   - You will be prompted to enter your iTunes password and will then be billed monthly.
2. Turn on iCloud Photo Library
   
   One of the biggest culprits of the “Not enough space available” message is Photos and typically you see this message when trying to take a photo.  The gut response is to go to the Photos app and start deleting photos to make space, which will most likely cause you to make hurried and rash decisions.  You may find that when you have more time you will take the photos off of your device and put them on a computer, which works for a time, but then you don’t have access to them on your phone anymore.  The iCloud Photo Library will put a copy of all the photos on your device onto Apple’s servers.  The photos will take up your iCloud storage space, but if you completed step 1 above then you will be able to store plenty of photos.  The added bonus is you can see all the photos on any iOS devices you are logged into and will also be able to view them at iCloud.com.  Your “Not enough space available” issue will also be resolved, because as your device starts to run low on space, the device will start to clean up any of the full versions of the photos that are on the device that are also on Apple’s servers.  You will always have small versions (thumbnails) of your photos on your devices, but no matter what the full version will always exist in the server, only to be downloaded to your device if you try to view it.
   
   How to enable iCloud Photo Library
   - Go to the Settings app
   - Navigate to the iCloud settings
   - Tap the Photos item
   - Flip the switch to turn on the “iCloud Photo Library”
   - Choose “Optimize iPhone Storage” if you have a small phone and lots of photos.
   - It will take a while for it to upload all your photos.  Go to iCloud.com and you can see how it is progressing
3. Turn on iCloud backup
   
   One of the most common features that people typically have turned off is the iCloud backup.  I often talk about this by saying, “I could take my phone and throw it into a river right now, go to an Apple store, buy a new phone and within minutes be up and running with everything exactly the same.”  Now of course that is a doomsday scenario, but this comes in handy when you get a new phone, because the first thing it asks you is whether or not you want to restore from an iCloud back up.
   
   How to enable iCloud Backup
   - Go to the Settings app
   - Navigate to the iCloud settings
   - Tap the Backup item
   - Turn on the back up
4. Change the name of your device
   I would always get confused in the past when looking at a list of my devices somewhere either in the Find my iPhone app or with back ups regarding which actual device it was talking about.  I used to just say “Keegan’s iPhone”.  Starting with my iPhone 5, I actually went in and updated the name to “Keegan’s iPhone 5” so if I updated to the iPhone 6S I would know exactly which phone it was talking about.
   
   How to update your device name
   - Go to the Settings app
   - Navigate to General > About
   - Tap the Name field and update your device name to the actual model number.

To say I was thrilled with the introduction of the iCloud Photo Library is an understatement.    I have been waiting for this type of single source library for years.  Of course I immediately turned it on for all  my devices and went all in (not completely in Photos for OS X, because my library was all referenced and it is a slow process moving them over).  I was also excited about the cool Optimize Storage option in iOS because in 2012, when I bought my iPhone 5, 16GB seemed like plenty of space.  

However, as I soon found out the Optimize Storage option would cause me more stress than I anticipated.  You see Apple decided that the optimization would be completely automatic with no opportunity for manual intervention for the user.  There is clearly some sort of algorithm that determines what full size versions of photos to keep on the device.  So far one of the rules revolves around photos taken within the last 30 days and there is also one based on photos that were downloaded locally to the device in the recent past.  It seems that no matter how low the available storage level goes the full size of these photos will remain on the device.  

I learned this because the other day I tried to take a video of my son playing baseball and got the dreaded “Video couldn’t be saved because of insufficient space” message. My heart sunk because I thought barring some insane offline photo taking spree this error would never appear on my devices again.  My expectation was that in the worst case scenario if space was running low (as in I didn’t have enough space to take one picture) that the “Optimize” setting would delete ANY photos that had already been uploaded to the cloud.  I figured maybe there were tiers:
if (availableStorage > 500MB) then don’t do any optimization
if (available Storage < 500MB && availableStorage > 250 MB) then get rid of any full size copies of photos from more than 30 days ago that have been uploaded to the cloud
if (availableStorage < 250MB) then delete any full size photos that have been uploaded to the cloud

No such luck though, it seems to insist on keeping some amount of full size photos on the device even if they exist in the cloud.  I was bit by this recently because about 2 weeks ago I went on a trip and recorded a bunch of video, which went up to the cloud nearly the same day.  However, now the 1GB of videos from last month sits on my device and I have no way of deleting it without also deleting the copy in the cloud too.

I tried all sorts of trickery like trying to delete the photos using the Image Capture app on my MacBook.  I turns out the delete functionality isn’t available if iCloud Photo Library is turned on for the device.  So I tried turning off the iCloud Photo Library on the phone and while the delete button appeared in Image Capture it didn’t really do anything.

In the end I found the best way to get me back some space was to turn off the iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone, which freed up some space because it removed all the iCloud Photo Library thumbnail photos, but all the full size photos were still on the device.  At this point I was able to use the Photos app on my iPhone to remove photos and videos from my device, but not from the iCloud Photo Library. I also had to delete them from the “Recently Deleted” album too. Once I got rid of some of the videos that had been taking up so much space I turned the iCloud Photo Library back on and it started downloading the thumbnails again, but I now have a 1.5 more GB of free space on my iPhone.