Why they accumulate
Because almost every screenshot is taken for a reason that expires. A confirmation code, a receipt, an address, a recipe, a meme, a booking reference, a thing you meant to send someone. The reason lasts an hour; the file lasts forever, because nothing in iOS ever asks whether you are done with it.
They are also the one category people feel no attachment to, which makes them the easiest large cleanup in any library — and the one most worth doing first.
What it costs you in storage
Individually, less than a camera photo — but by less than people assume. PNG is a lossless format, and a screenshot of a photo-heavy screen does not compress anything like a HEIC of the same scene, so a screen full of images can cost about as much as a real photograph. A screen of plain text costs a fraction of one.
The real cost is the count. Screenshots arrive several a day for years without a single one ever being reviewed, and screen recordings — filed in the same part of the library — are video, which puts them in a different weight class entirely.
What you can do about it in iOS
- Open Photos › Albums › Media Types › Screenshots. Everything is in one place, oldest at the top.
- Tap Select, then drag your finger across the grid rather than tapping each one — it selects whole rows at a time, and it is the difference between a minute and an hour.
- Delete, then empty Recently Deleted if you want the space back today.
Old screenshots are safe to clear in bulk precisely because they were never memories — but check for the handful that quietly became records: a ticket, a warranty, a code you still need.
Kept reads screenshots on the device and sorts them by what they actually are — saved images, receipts, text, codes — so the piles that were never worth keeping can go in one pass.