How to Delete Old Screenshots in Google Photos

Search “screenshots” at photos.google.com, or open the Screenshots folder under Library on Android. Select a range with shift-click, delete it, then empty the Trash — storage is not reclaimed until you do. Google groups screenshots but never spots repeats of the same screen.

Why do screenshots take up so much Google Photos storage?

Individually, screenshots are small. A phone screenshot is typically 200 KB to 1 MB — a fraction of a 12 MP photo and nothing next to a 4K video clip. That is exactly why they go unnoticed for years.

The problem is volume and habit. Screenshots are the cheapest thing a phone can produce, so people take them constantly: a boarding pass, a Wi-Fi password, a recipe, an error message, a receipt, a bank confirmation, a chat thread, half a webpage. Almost all of them are useful for a day and dead weight forever after. A phone that takes ten screenshots a day accumulates over 3,500 a year, and every one of them backs up to Google Photos and eats Google One quota shared with Drive and Gmail.

There is a second, less obvious cost: screenshots pollute your library. They break up memories, clutter search results, and end up in the shared albums and slideshows Google generates for you. Even when the storage does not bother you, the noise does.

How do you delete screenshots in Google Photos, step by step?

1. 1

   Open the Screenshots category

   In the Google Photos app, go to Library. On Android, screenshots appear as a 'Screenshots' device folder fed by your phone's screenshot directory. Tap it to see them grouped in one place instead of scattered through your timeline.

2. 2

   Or search for them instead

   On the web at photos.google.com, or on iOS where there is no screenshot device folder, type 'screenshots' into the search bar. Google Photos classifies screenshots visually, so this catches them wherever they were backed up from.

3. 3

   Check Google's storage manager

   Go to photos.google.com/storage. Google's own review tool lists screenshots as one of its cleanup categories alongside large photos, blurry photos, and unsupported videos. It offers a bulk-select for everything it finds.

4. 4

   Select in bulk, not one by one

   Click or long-press the first screenshot, then shift-click (web) or drag across the grid (mobile) to select a whole range. Selecting by month is far faster than tapping individual items.

5. 5

   Delete, then empty the Trash

   Deleted screenshots sit in Trash for 60 days and keep counting against your Google One quota the whole time. Open Trash and empty it to actually reclaim the storage.

Where does Google's screenshot cleanup fall short?

Google's tools classify screenshots. They do not deduplicate them, and the gap matters more than it sounds.

Screenshots repeat far more than photos do. You screenshot the same chat three times while trying to capture the right part of it. You grab the same receipt on two devices. You re-screenshot a QR code because the first one was cut off. To Google Photos these are unrelated files — its only duplicate check runs at upload time and compares raw bytes, so two captures of the same screen taken a second apart are two different files with two different hashes. Nothing in the Screenshots category or the storage manager will tell you they are the same thing.

The screenshot category is also device-folder based on Android. It reads your phone's screenshot directory. Screenshots that arrived some other way — forwarded to you in a chat, saved from a browser, uploaded from a laptop, or synced from an iPhone that has no screenshot device folder — may never land in that folder at all. Search catches more of them than the folder does, which is why the two methods above are worth running separately.

And nothing Google offers looks across services. A screenshot saved into Google Drive and also backed up to Google Photos counts twice against the same quota, and cleaning one does not touch the other. The same blind spot applies to duplicate photos and duplicate videos.

What is the fastest way to clear screenshots for good?

Do the built-in pass first — it is free and it clears the easy bulk. Search “screenshots”, range-select by year, delete, and empty the Trash. For most libraries that is the single biggest win available in ten minutes.

What it leaves behind is the repeats: the near-identical captures Google has no way to group. AiCleanerPro Cloud uses perceptual hashing on thumbnails to compare screenshots by what they actually look like, so three captures of the same chat get grouped together with one marked to keep. It reads Google Photos and Google Drive in the same pass through read-only OAuth, deletes nothing without your confirmation, and routes everything it does delete through Google's 60-day Trash.

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