In this paper, we present novel strategies that are capable of significantly reducing the required memory sizes for a large class of data-intensive multimedia applications. The size reduction is obtained by reusing memory locations for arrays as much as possible through optimization of the storage order. These strategies are equally well suited for parallel and mono-processing applications, and are particularly useful in an embedded application context, where memory size is usually one of the main cost factors. Their feasibility and effectiveness is demonstrated by experimental results for some real-life multimedia applications, for which a considerable size reduction has been obtained.