Screenshots are the easiest win in any photo library, because almost none of them were meant to be kept. A receipt, a code, an address, a thing you wanted to show someone once. They’re notes, not photographs, and they sit in the same album as your holidays for years.
Every phone groups them separately, so you can clear hundreds in about two minutes without going near a photo you care about.
On iPhone and iPad
Your phone collects every screenshot into its own album automatically. Nothing to set up.
- Open Photos.
- Tap Collections, then scroll down to Media Types.
- Tap Screenshots.
- Tap Select, then drag your finger across the ones you want gone rather than tapping each one. Dragging selects in a sweep and is far quicker.
- Tap the bin.
To clear the lot, tap Select and then Select All at the top, then deselect the handful worth keeping.
The faster route for a big clear-out
Tap Search at the bottom of Photos and type screenshots. Same set, and the search results view is often easier to scan quickly.
They’re not gone yet. Anything you delete lands in Collections → Utilities → Recently Deleted for 30 days and keeps using storage the whole time. To get the space back now, go there, tap Select, then Delete All. That step is permanent.
Why they add up faster than you’d think
A screenshot is a full-resolution PNG of your whole screen. On a modern iPhone that’s a big image, and unlike a photograph it compresses badly, because screens are full of hard edges and flat colour rather than the soft gradients photo formats are tuned for.
So a few hundred screenshots is a real amount of storage for a set of files that are almost entirely disposable. It’s the highest ratio of space used to value kept anywhere in a typical library.
Stopping the pile-up
Two habits that help more than any clear-out.
Delete them on the spot
When you take a screenshot, the thumbnail appears in the corner for a few seconds. Swipe it away and it saves. Instead, tap it, tap Done, and choose Delete Screenshot. It never enters your library at all. This is the single highest-value habit here.
Use the tool that fits the job
A lot of screenshots exist because it was the quickest way to save something. For a web page, Share → Add to Reading List or a bookmark keeps the actual page. For a receipt, Share → Save to Files keeps it out of Photos. For a code you need for ten minutes, the clipboard is enough.
What’s left is harder, and bigger
Once the screenshots are gone you’ll usually find they weren’t the main problem. They’re just the easiest part of it.
The bulk of a full photo library is almost always the shots that are nearly the same: the burst of nine from one moment, fourteen tries at the same photo because the light kept changing, three versions of a group photo where somebody blinked. Each of those is a genuinely different file, so nothing can safely pick for you, which is exactly why they’re all still there.
On an iPhone, the Duplicates album under Collections → Utilities merges exact copies for free and takes a couple of minutes. It won’t touch the nearly identical ones. Clearing duplicate photos on iPhone covers what it catches, what it leaves, and how to clear the rest.
If storage is the actual reason you came here, clearing space on your iPhone works through the whole library in the order that recovers the most space, and why your storage is full after deleting everything covers the case where you’ve cleared a lot and the number didn’t move.
Questions people actually ask
Where is my screenshot folder?
Photos → Collections → Media Types → Screenshots on an iPhone or iPad. There’s no separate folder on the device you can browse to: screenshots live in your normal photo library and that album is a filtered view of it, which is why deleting from there deletes the actual file.
How do I mass delete screenshots on iPhone?
Open the Screenshots album, tap Select, then drag your finger across the grid rather than tapping each one. It selects in a sweep and is dramatically faster. For everything at once, Select then Select All, then tap the few you want to keep to deselect them.
How do I get screenshots off my phone without deleting them?
AirDrop them to a Mac, or use Share → Save to Files to move them into iCloud Drive or an app like Dropbox, then delete the originals from Photos. For a handful, emailing them to yourself is quicker than any of that.
Do screenshots take up iCloud storage too?
Yes, if iCloud Photos is switched on. They’re ordinary items in your library, so they sync like everything else, and deleting them on the phone removes them from iCloud at the same moment. That also means clearing screenshots helps both numbers at once, which isn’t true of every kind of clean-up.
Will deleting screenshots free up much space?
Some, and it’s the fastest space you’ll ever recover, but usually less than you hope. A few hundred screenshots is worth clearing in two minutes. If your library is genuinely full, the space is in video and in the runs of near-identical photographs, not in the notes you took of a train time.
The short version
- iPhone and iPad group them at Collections → Media Types → Screenshots.
- Drag to select in a sweep rather than tapping one at a time.
- Empty Recently Deleted afterwards or the space doesn’t come back for 30 days.
- Delete them the moment you take them, from the corner thumbnail, and the problem stops recurring.
More on this: Freeing up iPhone storage
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