Getting Screenshots Out of Your Photo Backup
Okay so last time we found all your screenshots in one place, sitting in that album. This lesson is about actually getting them out of your regular photo backup so they stop taking up space and cluttering things up.
Quick reminder why we're doing this. Screenshots are not photos. I said that back in the first lesson of this module and I'll keep saying it, it's kind of my hill to die on. A screenshot of a receipt or a group text is not the same thing as a picture of your kid, and if they all live together in the same backup, you can't find anything and you're paying to store junk you don't need.
First, let's talk numbers
When I finally turned on auto-backup for the first time, I just sat there and watched the upload counter climb. Past a thousand, past five thousand, and it did not stop. It landed somewhere past 22,000 photos before it finished. I felt a little sick, honestly. I had no idea I was carrying around eight years of camera roll like it was nothing.
And a huge chunk of that number, once I actually looked, was not photos at all. It was screenshots. Recipes I never cooked. Texts I didn't need. A frankly embarrassing number of screenshots of things I meant to buy at Costco. All of it got backed up right alongside pictures of my kids because at the time I didn't know the difference between "photos" and "everything the phone considers an image." That's the whole reason this module exists.
So if your counter climbed high too, don't panic. Some of that is real photos. A lot of it is probably not.
Getting them out (iPhone)
- Open Photos, go to the Screenshots album we found last time (it's under Media Types or Utilities depending on your phone).
- Tap Select in the top right.
- Tap through the ones you actually want to keep. Be honest with yourself, most of you do not need the screenshot of a text from 2021.
- Tap the trash can. It moves them to Recently Deleted, where they sit for 30 days before they're really gone.
- If you want that space back now instead of waiting, go to the Recently Deleted album and empty it manually.
That's it. That's the whole process. It's a little tedious, I'm not going to pretend it's fun, but it's not complicated.
Getting them out (Android)
This is roughly the same idea, but the exact menu names move around depending on your phone, so I'm going to be honest, I'm shakier here. In Google Photos there's usually a way to filter by screenshots under search or under a Utilities section, and from there you can select and delete the same way. If your phone's a little different, holler at the room, I know we've got some Android people here who've done this and can walk you through their exact screen.
A caution before you mass-delete
Don't just select all and delete without scrolling through first. Sometimes an actual photo gets misfiled as a screenshot, especially if you ever screen-recorded a video of a kid's game or took a screenshot mid-video call with grandkids. Scroll through once before you commit. Takes an extra two minutes and saves you from losing something you actually wanted.
Also, once you delete, remember it comes out of your backup too eventually, not just the phone. So don't do this the same week you're trying to find something specific for a project. Give yourself a little buffer.
Where should screenshots actually live
My opinion, and I'll say it plain: keep a small handful of screenshots you genuinely need, like a confirmation number or an address someone texted you, and get them out of your main photo stream entirely. Some people move them into a separate folder just for reference stuff. Some people just delete on sight once they've used the information. I lean toward deleting on sight, because a screenshot of a confirmation number is useful for about four days and then it's garbage forever after that.
You do not need to keep every screenshot any more than you need to keep every photo. I've said this about sunsets and I'll say it about receipts. Keeping everything means you can't find anything, and screenshots are the worst offenders because there are just so many of them and none of them are precious.
Before next time
Go through your screenshots album and delete anything older than a year that you haven't opened since you took it. If you genuinely don't know whether you need something, leave it, we'll talk about that gray area next time.