How to Delete Screenshots on iPhone and Free Up Storage (2026)
You clear out your Camera Roll, delete a batch of videos, and go to check your storage. The bar barely moved. If that sounds familiar, screenshots are often the problem. They don't have their own entry in the iPhone storage breakdown — they're buried inside Photos — and they accumulate quietly every time you tap the side button and volume-up together.
The good news is they're all in one place and easy to clear in bulk once you know where to look.
Why Screenshots Accumulate So Fast
Think about what you screenshot on a typical week. A recipe you want to try. A parking confirmation. Something funny someone sent you. A flight itinerary. A tweet. A barcode. A QR code for an event last spring that's been sitting there since April.
Unlike photos you take intentionally, screenshots are almost always temporary. You capture them because you need something right now — and then you never think about them again. Meanwhile they stack up in the background, each one a few megabytes, each one still on your device months or years later.
The compounding effect is what catches people off guard. 400 screenshots on an iPhone 15 takes up roughly 2 GB. That's not nothing.
The Screenshots Album
Open the Photos app and tap Albums at the bottom. Scroll down past the section labeled People & Places until you hit Media Types. Screenshots is listed there.
This is the fastest way to see everything at once. All your screenshots, sorted newest first, no Camera Roll noise mixed in.
Deleting in Bulk
Tap Select in the top right corner. Now tap the first screenshot and, without lifting your finger, drag across the grid. Everything your finger passes over gets selected — work row by row to move through a large batch quickly. You can also tap individual screenshots to add or remove them from the selection.
Once you've selected what you want gone, tap the trash icon at the bottom right and confirm.
On iOS 17 and later, after selecting the first item you may also see a Select All option appear at the top. If it shows up, one tap selects every screenshot in the album. Worth checking before you start dragging.
The Part That Trips Everyone Up
Here's the thing about deleting from Photos: nothing is actually deleted immediately. Every photo or screenshot you remove goes into a holding folder called Recently Deleted and stays there for 30 days. Apple does this so you can undo an accidental deletion — which is genuinely useful. But it also means the storage stays locked until those 30 days are up, or until you empty the folder yourself.
To reclaim the space now:
- Go back to Albums and scroll all the way down to Utilities.
- Tap Recently Deleted.
- Tap Select, then Delete All, then confirm the deletion.
That's it. The storage releases immediately. This is one of those things iOS could surface more clearly — if you've ever wondered why deleting a gigabyte of photos didn't change your storage number, this is almost certainly why.
How Much Space Might You Get Back
Rough estimates based on device and resolution:
| iPhone model | Screenshot size (approx.) | 300 screenshots |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone SE / older | 2–4 MB | ~800 MB |
| iPhone 14, 15 (standard) | 5–7 MB | ~1.6 GB |
| iPhone 15 Pro / 16 series | 7–10 MB | ~2.5 GB |
If you've never cleared screenshots on a phone you've had for two or more years, clearing the whole album is worth doing even if you think the total won't be much.
If You Want This to Handle Itself
The manual approach works fine for a one-time cleanup. For keeping on top of it long-term, you have two options.
One is the Shortcuts app — iOS lets you build an automation that runs on a schedule and deletes screenshots older than X days. It takes about ten minutes to set up. Once running, you don't have to think about it.
The other is using a dedicated tool like EverClean AI (free to download on the App Store), which scans your full Photos library for storage issues — duplicate images, large files, and media clutter you'd miss doing this by hand. Useful as a regular maintenance run, not just a one-time fix. More background on how storage sneaks up on you is in What Is "Other" Storage on iPhone and How Do You Clear It.
Screenshots alone won't always explain a storage problem, but they're a consistent contributor that most people ignore. Worth clearing first before diving into anything more complicated.