How to delete all screenshots on your iPhone

The free route, in four taps

1. Open Photos and go to Albums.
2. Scroll down to Media Types and open Screenshots.
3. Tap Select, then drag your finger across the grid to select a run of them quickly.
4. Tap the bin icon and confirm.

That album is on every iPhone, it is populated automatically because iOS tags screenshots when you take them, and it costs nothing. For a few hundred screenshots this is genuinely the fastest thing you can do.

Then empty Recently Deleted

Nothing you just deleted has freed any space yet. Go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted, tap Select, then Delete All. iOS keeps deleted items for 30 days and they occupy storage the whole time. This catches almost everyone out, and there is a longer explanation of why the storage bar does not move.

Where the free route gets awkward

• No sizes. The album shows you thumbnails, not bytes. You cannot tell whether clearing it is worth the effort until you have done it.
• Selection at scale. Drag selecting across several thousand items in a single grid is slow and easy to lose. One mistaken tap and you start again.
• Duplicated screenshots count twice. If you screenshotted the same thing three times, all three sit in the album as separate items with nothing pointing that out.
• No way to skim. Reviewing whether a screenshot still matters means opening each one.

What Nixly adds

Screenshots are one of Nixly's four categories, and the tile shows a measured byte total before you open it, so you know in advance whether there is a gigabyte in there or forty megabytes. That figure is the sum of the real file sizes, requested per item, not an estimate from resolution.

Anything Nixly has already grouped as an exact duplicate is taken out of the pool before the screenshot list is built, so a screenshot that exists three times is handled once as a duplicate group rather than counted three times here. That is why the four category totals add up cleanly.

You can also review screenshots in the swipe deck, which is faster than a selection grid because it shows one item at a time at a readable size with its file size on the card. A swipe left marks it, a swipe right keeps it, and nothing is removed until you tap the delete button. There is more on that in swipe to delete photos on iPhone.

Why screenshots pile up in the first place

They are almost all short lived by nature: a confirmation number, a route, a receipt, a message you wanted to forward, three attempts at capturing the same thing. The value expires within a day, but nothing in iOS expires with it. That is what makes them the safest category to clear in bulk, and it is why Nixly lists them separately rather than mixing them into a general pile.

One caution worth keeping: screenshots of documents, tickets and codes look disposable and are not. Nixly never pre-selects screenshots for you. Unlike the duplicate and similar categories, where the removal candidates are ticked by default, the screenshot list starts with nothing selected. You choose.