Finding All Your Screenshots in One Place
Okay so last time we talked about the difference between a photo and everything your phone calls an image, screenshots included. Sooo this lesson is where we actually go find all of them and get them into one spot instead of scattered through your whole camera roll.
Because right now they're not in one spot. They're mixed in with your real photos, in order, by date, which means a screenshot of a receipt is sitting right between a picture of your kid's birthday cake and a picture of the mountains. That's the mess we're fixing.
Why this matters before you organize anything else
I feel like people want to skip straight to "make cute folders" and I get it, but screenshots are the thing that ruins a folder system before it even starts. You cannot tell at a glance which of your 8,000 photos are actual photos and which are a text conversation you screenshotted so you wouldn't forget an address. They all look the same in a grid of thumbnails until you tap on them.
This is one of my small hills, I'll die on it: screenshots are not photos and they should not live with your photos. Separate them out or your whole system falls apart later. Doesn't matter how good your folders are if a third of what's in them is grocery lists and text threads.
Finding them on iPhone
This part's easy, which is nice because not everything in this class is.
- Open your Photos app.
- Tap "Albums" at the bottom.
- Scroll down to where it says "Media Types." There should be one that just says "Screenshots."
- Tap it.
That's it. Your phone already sorted these for you, it's just been sitting there the whole time nobody looked. Mine had over 1,900 screenshots in it the first time I checked. Not proud of that number, just telling you it's real.
Finding them on Android
This is the part where I want somebody in the room who has an Android phone to help me, because it moves around more depending on the phone. On a lot of Android phones you'll open Google Photos, tap "Library" at the bottom, and there should be a "Screenshots" folder listed there, sometimes under "Utilities." If you don't see it, try the Photos app that came on your phone, not just Google Photos, same idea, look for an album called Screenshots.
If your phone genuinely doesn't have that folder built in, don't panic, we'll deal with that a different way next time. Just raise your hand and tell me which phone you've got so I can look at it during break.
What to actually do once you've found them
Now that you can see them all in one place, you've got some choices.
Delete the ones you don't need anymore. Most screenshots are temporary. A confirmation number, a text you needed for one afternoon, a meme somebody sent you three years ago. You do not need to keep all of it. I've said this before about photos and it's true here too, maybe even more true, keeping everything just means you can't find the one screenshot that actually matters, like the confirmation code for Skylar's dance recital tickets, buried under four hundred receipts.
Keep the ones that matter, but move them. If it's a screenshot of an address, a recipe, something you use over and over, fine, keep it. But I'd pull it out of the general screenshot pile and either save it somewhere specific or just leave it be and rely on search. Google Photos and the iPhone Photos app can both search for text inside a screenshot now, which still kind of amazes me. Type "confirmation" in the search bar and it'll find it.
I'll be honest, this connects to why I got serious about any of this in the first place. My mother-in-law Inez wanted the temple pictures from her and Travis printed for her wall, and I went looking for them on my phone and could not find them. Not because they weren't there, they were there, they were just buried under screenshots. Hundreds of screenshots. It took me forty minutes to find two pictures because I'd never separated the two kinds of images. That was the moment I got serious about folders, and it's the same reason I'm making you do this now.
A plain caution
When you're deleting screenshots, go slow the first time through. It's easy to get into a rhythm of swiping and deleting and accidentally clear something you actually wanted, like a screenshot of a flight confirmation or a doctor's office address. Take your time on the first pass. You can always speed up once you trust yourself.
Before next time
Go find your screenshots folder, on whichever phone you've got, and just look at how many are in there. Don't delete anything yet if you don't want to, just come back next time knowing the number. Mine was 1,900-something and I feel like most people's is bigger than they think.