How to Delete All Screenshots on iPhone

The Fast Answer

To delete all screenshots on an iPhone: open Photos, tap Albums, scroll down to Media Types, tap Screenshots, then tap Select → Select All → the trash icon. Then empty Recently Deleted, because until you do, the files still count against your storage for 30 days.

That takes under a minute and clears the whole category. The rest of this guide covers when you should not select all, how to find the screenshots that are near-identical to each other, and why the album sometimes looks smaller than reality.

Why Screenshots Accumulate Faster Than You Notice

Screenshots are disposable by nature: a two-factor code, a receipt, a set of directions, a meme, an error message you meant to send someone. Almost none of them are worth keeping a week later, and none of them get deleted, because deleting one screenshot has never felt urgent.

The effect compounds. On a library older than three years, screenshots typically account for 10–16% of the total photo count. At roughly 0.55 MB each, two thousand screenshots is over a gigabyte — not the biggest storage problem on a phone, but the easiest one to fix without a single judgement call.

Method 1: The Screenshots Album (Free, Built In)

iOS files every screenshot into an automatic album. Photos → Albums → Media Types → Screenshots. Tap Select in the top right, then Select All, then the trash. Confirm, and the whole album empties.

If you would rather not nuke the lot, tap Select and then drag your finger across the grid to sweep-select a run of thumbnails — far faster than tapping each one. Sorting is chronological, so the oldest screenshots sit at the top and are almost always the safest to remove.

One caveat: this album only holds screenshots taken on the device. Screen recordings live under Media Types → Videos, and images saved from other apps are not screenshots at all, so they will not appear here.

Method 2: Group the Near-Identical Ones First

Selecting all is fine when every screenshot is disposable. It is not fine when the album holds boarding passes, reference material for a project, or receipts you still need. The problem is that scrolling two thousand thumbnails to find the twenty keepers costs more time than the storage is worth.

This is where grouping helps. AiCleanerPro clusters visually similar screenshots — the four attempts at capturing the same chat, the six frames of the same web page — so you keep one per group and delete the rest without reviewing every file individually. It runs on-device in about 30 seconds and everything deleted goes to a 30-day recycle bin.

For the broader cleanup beyond screenshots, our complete iPhone storage guide ranks every fix by how much space it actually returns.

Empty Recently Deleted or Nothing Changes

This is the step people skip. Deleted photos and screenshots move to Photos → Albums → Recently Deleted and stay there for 30 days, still consuming storage the entire time. Open that album, tap Select, then Delete All.

After that, Settings → General → iPhone Storage can take a few minutes to recalculate. If the number has not moved immediately, wait rather than deleting more.

Stop the Pile From Rebuilding

Two habits keep the album small. First, delete the screenshot at the moment it stops being useful — right after you have typed the code or sent the receipt. Second, sweep the Screenshots album once a month; a month's worth is a two-minute job, three years' worth is not.

For the screenshots you genuinely need to keep, move them into a named album so they leave the disposable pile. Then Select All on the Screenshots album stays safe forever.

What Else Is Eating the Space

Screenshots are rarely the largest problem. Duplicates and near-duplicate photos usually are, and forgotten video clips dwarf both. If the phone is genuinely full, work down the list in iPhone storage full: fix it in under 5 minutes rather than starting here.

To see the split before you touch anything, the photo waste calculator estimates how many gigabytes each category is costing you. And if your screenshots also sync to Google Photos, they occupy a second quota there that an iPhone cleanup does not touch.