How to delete screenshots on iPhone in bulk
Screenshots are the easiest storage win on any phone. There are a lot of them, you almost never look at one twice, and iOS has already sorted them for you.
The album already exists
Photos → Albums → scroll to Media Types → Screenshots. Every screenshot you have ever taken lives in there, and most people have thousands without realizing it.
Clearing them fast
- Open the album and tap Select.
- Tap the first one, then drag across the grid instead of tapping each one — it is far faster, and you can drag down through months in a few seconds. I learned this trick embarrassingly late.
- Or tap Select All if you are confident.
- Delete, then empty Recently Deleted too, or nothing actually frees up for 30 days.
The ones worth keeping
Scroll first, before you Select All. The handful of things people regret losing are the same every time: a confirmation number, a QR or boarding pass, a receipt, a two-factor backup code, a screenshot of an address, or a parking bay.
The fastest way to protect them: go through once, Favourite the keepers, then delete the rest. Favourites live in their own album, so you can always check what you saved.
Why there are so many
Most screenshots are notes. You photograph a train time instead of writing it down, and the note outlives its use by four years. Nothing prompts you to delete it, because nothing knows it was only ever temporary.
Two things cut down the flow. Use Share → Add to Notes for anything you actually need later, so it lands somewhere searchable. And check Settings → Photos → Shared Albums, since screenshots in a shared album count against you on every device.
Text screenshots are a special case
iOS can read text inside images — touch and hold a screenshot and the text becomes selectable. That means a screenshot of a receipt is searchable in Photos by its contents. If you are keeping screenshots as records, that is genuinely useful. If you are keeping them by accident — most of us are — it does not help.
Sift — Clean up photo storage. See what it does →