Time To Swipe Get the app

One category at a time

Deleting screenshots in bulk

Screenshots are the easiest cleanup there is: hundreds of items, almost all of them obsolete the week after they were taken, and both phones already tag them for you.

Why there are so many

Every screenshot was taken for a reason that expired. A confirmation number for a flight you have taken. A recipe you cooked. An address you have arrived at. A joke from a group chat in 2023. A bank balance you were checking against a bill that is now paid.

That is what makes them the ideal first cleanup: the decisions are quick, because the question is not “is this a good photo” but “did this thing already happen”. Most people can clear several hundred in a sitting without ever hesitating.

They are also the reason your library is hard to search. Screenshots sit between your actual photographs in date order, so scrolling back to something from last summer means scrolling through four hundred pictures of other people’s apps.

Count, not size

It is worth being straight about the payoff. Screenshots are usually the biggest count in a camera roll and rarely the biggest cause of a full phone — a screenshot is typically a few hundred kilobytes to a couple of megabytes, against roughly 400 MB for a minute of 4K video.

Five hundred screenshots might be somewhere around half a gigabyte. That is real, and it is not what will rescue a phone that is completely full.

If the goal is free space rather than a tidy library, review videos first. If the goal is being able to find your own photographs again, screenshots are the right place to start.

Finding them all

Both operating systems tag a screenshot as a screenshot when it is taken, so nothing needs to be detected or guessed.

iPhone

Photos › Albums › Media Types › Screenshots collects every one automatically.

You can select and delete from there, though it is still a grid of thumbnails, so you are back to squinting at small squares to decide.

Android

Screenshots are saved to their own folder, which appears as an album in Google Photos and in most manufacturer galleries.

Google Photos also has a Screenshots category under Library, which pulls them together across folders.

Time To Swipe uses the same underlying tag to filter the deck, so you get the same set of items shown one at a time and full size, one gesture per decision, instead of a grid of thumbnails and a multi-select.

A method that works

Reviewing several hundred anything is a grind if you do it as one undifferentiated pile. What works is a rule you can apply without thinking, so the decisions stop being individual judgements.

  1. Filter to screenshots only, so every decision is the same kind of decision.
  2. Work oldest first. Old screenshots are almost all dead — the event has happened, the code has been used, the thing has been bought. The hit rate is enormously higher and it builds momentum.
  3. Adopt one rule: if you cannot tell within a second why you took it, it goes. You will not miss it, and you did not remember it existed until this moment.
  4. Keep the exceptions deliberately narrow. Warranties, tickets not yet used, receipts you might need to claim, screenshots of conversations that matter. Everything else is fair game.
  5. Confirm the batch, then empty Recently Deleted or your gallery’s Bin so the space is actually returned.

The whole first pass is usually two sittings of twenty minutes, and the effect on how usable your library feels is out of proportion to the time.

Stopping the pile rebuilding

None of this holds unless the inflow changes, and the inflow is not really the problem — screenshots are a genuinely good way to save something quickly. The problem is that they go in the same place as your photographs and nothing ever takes them out again.

Two habits do most of the work. Delete the screenshot at the moment it stops being useful, which is usually within the same hour. And put a recurring twenty minutes somewhere you will actually honour it, because a category cleanup done four times a year never lets the pile get above a manageable size.

The second one only survives if it is short and can be done standing up, which is the entire design argument for one-handed swipe review.

Common questions

How do I delete all screenshots at once on iPhone?

Photos › Albums › Media Types › Screenshots, then Select and either tap individual items or drag across them, then delete. Bear in mind that Select All in that album really does mean all of them, including anything you meant to keep, and everything then sits in Recently Deleted for thirty days before the space comes back.

How do I delete all screenshots at once on Android?

Open the Screenshots album in Google Photos or your gallery app, select the items and delete. If backup is on, deleting also removes them from your Google account. They then sit in a bin — thirty days for items that were not backed up, currently sixty for items that were — until it is emptied.

Do screenshots take up a lot of space?

Individually no, collectively a moderate amount. A screenshot is usually a few hundred kilobytes to a couple of megabytes, so several hundred of them come to well under a gigabyte. They dominate the item count rather than the storage, which means clearing them makes a library usable rather than making a full phone empty.

Is there an app that deletes screenshots automatically?

Nothing can delete them without your confirmation — both platforms require a system dialog for any app removing media it did not create. An app can find every screenshot and queue them for you, which is most of the work, but the deletion itself is always something you approve.

Get the app

Free on iPhone and Android. No account, no sign-up, and your photos stay where they are.

Available now on the App Store and Google Play.

Free to download. No account, no sign-up.

Last updated 2026-09-03