How to Mass Delete Screenshots on iPhone (3 Ways)

Screenshots are the fruit flies of a photo library. Each one felt necessary for about nine seconds - a boarding pass, a recipe, an argument receipt, a Wi-Fi password - and now there are 2,400 of them between you and the photos you actually care about.

The good news: screenshots are the easiest category of photo clutter to wipe out, because iOS already keeps them in one album. Here are three ways to do it, depending on how surgical you want to be.

Method 1: Select-All in the Screenshots Album (Fastest)

iOS files every screenshot into a dedicated album automatically:

Open Photos → Albums, scroll to Utilities → Screenshots (under Media Types on some versions)
Tap Select
Either tap screenshots one by one, or touch one and drag your finger across and down - the drag selects in bulk surprisingly fast
Tap the trash icon, confirm
Go to Albums → Utilities → Recently Deleted → Delete All to reclaim the space immediately

There is no true “select all” button inside an album, but the drag-select gesture covers hundreds of items in under a minute.

The catch is obvious: this nukes everything, including the screenshot of your tax confirmation and the one with your locker combination. If anything in there might matter, use Method 3 instead.

Method 2: Auto-Delete Old Screenshots with Shortcuts

For ongoing hygiene rather than a one-time purge, the Shortcuts app can delete screenshots older than a cutoff:

Open Shortcuts and create a new shortcut
Add Find Photos → filter: Media Type is Screenshot, and Date Taken is before [30 days ago]
Add Delete Photos as the action
Optionally, set it to run on a schedule via Automation (for example, the 1st of every month)

Run it monthly and screenshots become self-cleaning: anything you have not rescued into a real album within 30 days quietly goes away. iOS will ask you to confirm deletions when the shortcut runs, which is a reasonable safety net.

This takes ten minutes to set up once and is the closest iOS gets to “auto delete screenshots.”

Method 3: Sort the Keepers First with an AI Cleaner

The honest problem with mass deletion is that 2% of those screenshots are genuinely worth keeping, and they are mixed in with the 98% that are not. Reviewing 2,400 thumbnails by hand to find them is the part nobody does.

This is where a cleaner like Snapsift earns its place. It treats screenshots as their own junk category and:

Shows them grouped and sorted so duplicates and near-identical screenshots cluster together (yes, you screenshotted the same recipe three times)
Lets you swipe through fast, keep-or-toss style, instead of tap-selecting in a grid
Tallies the storage you are about to reclaim before you commit
Runs entirely on-device, so screenshots of sensitive things stay private

It also catches the clutter the Screenshots album cannot: blurry shots, accidental photos, and the similar-photo clusters that are usually the real reason storage is full.

Why Screenshots Eat More Than You Think

A single screenshot is small - a few hundred KB to a couple of MB on modern screens. The volume is what gets you. Screenshots arrive at a pace photos never do (every confirmation, every meme, every “I’ll just save this for later”), and unlike photos, you never delete them in the moment because they cost nothing to take.

Two years of casual screenshotting is routinely several GB. If your iPhone storage is full, the Screenshots album is one of the three or four places that space went.

A Sane Screenshot Policy

What works long-term, in one paragraph: screenshots are disposable by default. If one matters, act on it within the week - save the info somewhere real (notes, passwords app, calendar) or move it to a named album. Everything else gets cleared monthly, either by the Shortcuts automation or a five-minute Snapsift pass. The library stays a photo library instead of a junk drawer.

FAQ

Can I delete all screenshots at once on iPhone? Effectively yes: open the Screenshots album, tap Select, drag-select across everything, delete. Then empty Recently Deleted. There is no single “delete all” button, but the gesture takes under a minute.

Does deleting screenshots free up iCloud storage too? Yes, if you use iCloud Photos - deletions sync across devices and reduce your iCloud usage once Recently Deleted is emptied.

Can iPhone auto-delete screenshots after a period? Not natively, but a Shortcuts automation (Find Photos → Screenshots older than 30 days → Delete) does exactly this on a schedule you choose.

How do I find duplicate screenshots? Apple’s Duplicates album catches exact copies. For near-identical screenshots (the same page captured twice, slightly scrolled), an AI cleaner that groups by similarity does the matching for you.