The Storage Clean-Up Routine: Tag First, Transfer Last

Almost every storage horror story is the same story: a mass transfer run on a search that was a little too wide. So the routine runs in the opposite order to instinct. You do not start by looking for things to delete. You start by looking at everything you must never delete, and you only build the transfer search at the very end, out of what is left.

This search shows the irreplaceable pile in one screen. It is a plain OR list, so a Pokemon appears if it matches any one term:

• 4* is a 15/15/15. lucky powers up for half the Stardust. shiny, costume and background are the things events will not hand you twice.
• @special finds Pokemon that know a legacy or event-exclusive move. A Community Day move on a bad-IV Pokemon is still worth more than a good-IV one without it, because only an Elite TM can put it back; the Elite TM guide explains why those are too scarce to waste.
• dynamax and gigantamax matter because, as the game stands, only Pokemon caught with that ability can use it. It cannot be added to an ordinary catch later.
• xxl and xxs are the extreme sizes, the ones collectors and PokeStop Showcases look for.

Scroll the result once. Anything in it that you would be upset to lose, favourite it: a favourited Pokemon cannot be transferred or traded at all, which makes the star the one protection that survives a careless search. You are not trying to keep this whole pile forever (a shiny Pidgey collection can be thinned by hand later). You are making sure none of it can be swept up by accident.

Search strings describe what a Pokemon is. They cannot describe what you intend to do with it — that the 1,480 CP Marill is your Great League project, or that the fourth Machamp is for a friend. Tags store that, and # plus the tag name searches it. Five are enough:

Keep tag names to one word with no spaces so they are painless to type into a search. The Mega tag deserves a special mention: Mega Level is earned per individual Pokemon (1, 7 and 30 evolutions for the three main levels), so the Charizard you have evolved 30 times is not interchangeable with the better-IV one you caught yesterday. megaevolve lists every Pokemon that can Mega Evolve; tag the ones you have already put work into.

Which species deserve a Raid or PvP tag is a meta question, not a storage one. Use best attackers by type and the league tier lists for that, and the IV checker to read exact IVs from the appraisal bars before you tag.

A Great League Pokemon has to be at or under 1,500 CP, an Ultra League one at or under 2,500, and both want low Attack IVs rather than high ones (the reasoning, with numbers, is in PvP IVs explained). That gives you searches that surface the right pile without touching anything already handled. Each is a pure AND chain:

Great League: 1,500 CP and under

Ultra League: 1,501 to 2,500 CP

Little Cup formats: 500 CP and under

Hundos and Luckies are excluded on purpose. A Lucky has an IV floor of 12 and a hundo is all 15s, so both carry the expensive high Attack that a capped league punishes. They belong to the next search instead:

Master League and raids: high IVs wanted

You will not appraise a thousand Pokemon, and you do not need to. Add a species name in front with an ampersand to work through one tier-list pick at a time, for example azumarill&cp-1500, keep the best one or two per league, tag them PvP, and move on. Remember the base forms: a Marill under 1,500 CP is an Azumarill candidate, and IVs do not change on evolution.

Two kinds of otherwise ordinary Pokemon are worth more in a trade than in the transfer bin.

Distance catches

A trade between Pokemon caught 100 km or more apart guarantees XL Candy for both trainers. Everything you caught on a trip qualifies, however bad the IVs:

Old catches

Since New Year 2026, trading a Pokemon caught in 2020 or earlier is a guaranteed Lucky, up to a lifetime cap reported at 45 guaranteed Luckies per trainer. A Lucky costs half the Stardust to power up, so an old catch of a species you would actually raid with is a real asset. This OR list finds them:

Tag what you want to hold as Trade, and be honest about volume. The game allows 100 trades a day but only one Special Trade, and trading needs a friend standing within 100 metres. If that happens a few times a month, a trade pile of 60 Pokemon gets used. A trade pile of 600 is just storage you have stopped looking at.

Timing helps. Community Days in 2026 have typically come with half-price trades and an extra Special Trade until 21:00 local time, which makes that afternoon the cheapest moment to empty the pile. Check the bonus list of the specific event on the events page; the trading guide covers the Stardust costs.

Only now do you search for things to delete, and the search contains no positive term at all. It is nothing but exclusions: every protected category from step 1, your favourites, and every tag from steps 2 to 4. Whatever survives all of those is, by construction, a Pokemon you have no recorded reason to keep.

How it is built, so you can change it safely:

• ! negates exactly one term, and & means AND. "Not shiny and not lucky and not a hundo" is therefore !shiny&!lucky&!4*. Writing the exclusions with commas instead would mean "not shiny OR not lucky", which matches nearly everything you own.
• There are no commas in the string at all. A search made only of ampersands cannot be regrouped into something you did not mean.
• Tag names are yours. If you named a tag differently in step 2, change it here too, or that tag protects nothing.

Two optional additions

If you have not reviewed your Shadow Pokemon yet, keep them out of the first pass. Shadows cost 20% more to power up and cannot be traded, so most are fodder, but the good ones are among the strongest raid attackers in the game; decide with Shadow, purified or normal first.

And if you are mid-event, leave today's catches alone until you have appraised them:

Run the search, sort by CP or by recent, and scroll the result before you select anything. You are looking for surprises: a high-CP evolved Pokemon you forgot to tag, a regional from a trip. Tag or favourite those, run the search again, and transfer what remains. The string is a filter, not a verdict; the thirty seconds of scrolling is what makes it safe.

Most overfull storages are not full of rare things. They are full of fourth and fifth copies kept "just in case". A number per purpose ends that:

The raid row is the one people resist. Six is the ceiling for a species that tops its type; for a species that is merely decent, the honest number is zero, because those slots in the party go to something better. If Stardust is the real constraint, the Stardust priorities guide will tell you that you cannot afford to power up twelve of anything anyway.

Pokemon storage tops out at 12,650 and the item bag at 12,000, both raised on 5 July 2026. An upgrade adds 50 slots for 200 PokeCoins. That is 4 coins per slot, so 1,000 extra slots is 20 upgrades and 4,000 coins. Since the October 2025 level rework, levelling up also grants storage for free, which is worth remembering before you buy.

Space is a fair thing to spend coins on, with one condition: buy it after a clean-up, not instead of one. If the transfer search in step 5 still returns hundreds of Pokemon, more slots only postpone the same afternoon of sorting, with more to sort. If the search comes back nearly empty and you are still within a hundred of the limit, your collection has genuinely outgrown the box, and an upgrade is the right purchase.

The practical target is headroom for the biggest day on your calendar. A three-hour Community Day can easily mean several hundred catches; arriving with fewer free slots than that means transferring in the middle of the event, which is exactly when mistakes happen.

Done once, the five steps take an evening. Repeated monthly, with tags already in place, they take about twenty minutes:

1. Protect (2 min). Run the step 1 list sorted by recent. Favourite anything new that you could not replace.
2. New PvP candidates (6 min). Run the Great and Ultra League searches for the two or three species you are currently hunting. Appraise, keep the best, tag it PvP.
3. Retire the replaced (2 min). Open #PvP and #Raid. Wherever a better copy has been built since last month, remove the tag from the old one so the transfer search can see it.
4. Top up the trade pile (3 min). Run the distance search after any trip. Tag what you will realistically trade, skip the rest.
5. Transfer (5 min). Run the step 5 string, scroll it for surprises, transfer.
6. Check headroom (2 min). Compare your free slots with the next big event on the calendar. If a full clean-up still leaves you short, that is the moment to buy an upgrade.

Every string in this guide uses operators from the official search help, and the search strings page lists the rest, with a builder for combining them. Adapt the tags and the species to your own account; keep the order. Protect, tag, then transfer.