How to Delete Screenshots on iPhone

Decided it’s finally time to clean up your Photos library and delete screenshots on your iPhone? Good call, as screenshots are one of the most temporary types of images we keep. You save a parking spot, a confirmation number, directions, a recipe, or a funny conversation, use it once, and then completely forget it’s still sitting in your library. Before long, hundreds of screenshots can accumulate and take up storage space for no real reason.

How to Delete Screenshots on iPhone Using the Built-in Photos App

If you’ve been putting off deleting screenshots because you didn’t want to search for them among all the other photos and videos in your library, you don’t have to anymore. Apple redesigned the Photos app quite some time ago and now alongside the Library tab, you’ll find Collections, where screenshots are grouped into their own category, separate from the rest of your images. From there, all you have to do is select the screenshots you no longer need and delete them. Just like regular photos, screenshots support multi-selection, so removing dozens (or even hundreds) of them only takes a few taps.

Here’s how:

1. Open the Photos app and tap Collections.
2. Scroll down to Media Types and open Screenshots.
3. Tap Select in the top-right corner, select the screenshots you want to delete and tap the Trash icon.
4. Confirm that you want to delete the selected screenshots.

One advantage of using the Screenshots collection instead of browsing your entire photo library is that you can delete all screenshots on your iPhone at once – for that simply tap Select, then Select All, and confirm the deletion.

More Convenient Methods to Delete Screenshots on iPhone

The method above is Apple’s built-in way to delete screenshots, and it’s probably familiar to most iPhone users already. We wanted this guide to offer something beyond the obvious, so we asked members of our team how they actually manage screenshots on their own devices. You can see the results in the graphic below.

Besides the standard Photos app method, three additional approaches made the list. Each has its own advantages depending on your habits, so they’re all worth a look before you settle on a favorite. (For the sake of this guide, we excluded responses from team members who admitted they never delete screenshots at all. Helpful as that may have been, it wouldn’t have made for a very useful guide.)

Method 1: Use an iPhone Cleaner App to Delete Screenshots

When we asked our team how they usually get rid of screenshots, the most people said they only bother deleting screenshots while cleaning up their entire photo library. If that’s how you manage your iPhone too, a dedicated cleaner app makes much more sense than deleting screenshots manually. There are two reasons for that – first, it’s considerably faster and second, you get features that simply aren’t available in Apple’s Photos app.

Our cleaner of choice is Clever Cleaner. Besides being the top recommendation in our list of the best iPhone cleaning apps, it’s completely free, contains no ads, and has one of the cleanest interfaces we’ve used.

One of its dedicated categories is Screenshots, which lets you either remove selected screenshots or delete all of them at once. Even better, it shows exactly how much storage your screenshots occupy – Apple’s Photos app doesn’t tell you this. In our case, screenshots alone were taking up 16.3 GB. That’s far more than we expected.

Here’s how to delete screenshots with Clever Cleaner:

1. Download Clever Cleaner from the App Store and open it.
2. Grant the app access to your photo library and wait for the initial scan to finish. After that, open the Screenshots section.
3. Review your screenshots. You can either tap Move All to Trash to remove everything or open individual screenshots to review them first.
4. If you choose to review them, tap a screenshot to keep it selected for deletion or swipe up to skip it.
5. When you’re finished, tap Empty Trash and confirm the deletion.
6. The app will display how much storage you’ve reclaimed and remind you to empty the Recently Deleted album to permanently remove the screenshots.

Since this method is usually part of a broader photo library cleanup rather than just deleting screenshots, it’s worth mentioning the other cleanup tools Clever Cleaner includes:

• Similars finds both duplicate and visually similar photos, automatically picks what it considers the best shot, and marks the rest for removal. It dramatically reduces the time spent sorting through large photo libraries.
• Heavies lists your largest files first, making it easy to identify videos that consume the most storage. It also includes a built-in video compression tool with three compression levels and an estimate of how much space you’ll save before compressing.
• Swipe groups photos by month and lets you review them using simple left and right swipes. A progress indicator shows how much of your library you’ve already gone through.
• Lives converts Live Photos into standard still images while preserving image quality, helping reclaim storage without deleting the photo itself.

Method 2: Create a Shortcut to Delete Screenshots

The next method suggested by members of our team was to create a custom shortcut. Honestly, we consider the colleagues who came up with this absolute geniuses as for most of the rest of us, the Shortcuts app was simply something that came pre-installed on the iPhone and had never been opened (and if it had been opened, it was usually closed again almost immediately).

Once we got over the initial this looks way too complicated impression, Shortcuts turned out the app wasn’t nearly as intimidating as we thought. In fact, it’s one of the easiest ways to automate repetitive tasks on an iPhone, and deleting screenshots is a perfect example of that.

The main advantage of this method is that you can set specific conditions instead of deleting everything at once. For example, you can create a shortcut that finds screenshots taken on a particular day, before or after a certain date, or within a chosen date range. That makes it a better option when you want to remove something specific (if you simply need to delete every screenshot on your iPhone, either of the two previous methods will be faster).

Here’s how to create a shortcut for deleting screenshots:

1. Open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone.
2. Tap the + button in the upper-right corner to create a new shortcut.
3. Tap Add Action, search for Find Photos and add it.
4. Tap Add Filter.
5. Set the first filter to Is a Screenshot.
6. Then, add additional filters such as Date Taken is Today/Date Taken is Before/Date Taken is After/Date Taken is Between, add whichever conditions fit your needs.
7. Search for and add the Delete Photos action.
8. When prompted, allow the shortcut to delete photos.
9. Give your shortcut a name, such as Delete Screenshots, and tap Done.

The best part is that you only need to set everything up once. After that, running the shortcut takes a single tap. If your needs change later, simply edit the filters instead of building a new shortcut from scratch. You can even keep multiple versions around (for example, one that deletes screenshots older than a month and another that only targets screenshots from the current week).

Method 3: Delete iPhone Screenshots Using a Mac

Another answer that came up quite often in our team survey was deleting screenshots from a Mac instead of directly on the iPhone. Unsurprisingly, these were mostly the people who spend their days writing Mac guides, but after trying it ourselves, we can see why they prefer it. If you already work on your Mac throughout the day, cleaning up screenshots there can feel much more natural than doing it on your phone.

This method only works if you use iCloud Photos (when it’s enabled, your Photos library syncs across all Apple devices signed in with the same Apple Account) and that means every screenshot you take on your iPhone also appears in the Photos app on your Mac. From there, the process is almost identical to the built-in iPhone method – the difference is that you have a much larger screen to work with and the convenience of keyboard shortcuts.

Here’s how to delete screenshots from your Mac:

1. Open the Photos app on your Mac, in the sidebar, scroll to Media Types and select Screenshots.
2. Click the screenshots you want to delete. Hold Command (⌘) while clicking to select multiple screenshots.
3. Press the Delete key, or right-click and choose Delete Photos.
4. Confirm the deletion when prompted.

If you want to remove every screenshot at once, open the Screenshots album and press Command (⌘) + A to select everything, then press Delete. Just like on iPhone, don’t forget to empty the Recently Deleted album afterward if you want to reclaim the storage space immediately.

Conclusion

As you can see, deleting screenshots on an iPhone is no different from deleting any other type of photo. Apple has made the process much easier by placing them in a dedicated Screenshots album, so you no longer have to hunt for them throughout your entire photo library. And if that still doesn’t match the way you organize your photos, you have a few other options to choose from:

• Use Clever Cleaner if screenshot cleanup is usually part of a larger Photos library cleanup. Besides screenshots, it can also help you remove duplicate and similar photos, convert Live Photos into still images, and find large videos that are taking up storage.
• Create a custom Shortcut if you often need to delete screenshots from specific dates or within a particular time range.
• Use the Photos app on your Mac if you already spend most of your time there and prefer working with a larger screen and keyboard shortcuts.

And if deleting screenshots leaves you wanting to free up even more space, check out our guide on cleaning up other iPhone storage categories. Chances are, screenshots aren’t the only files taking up more room than they should.

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