Make Your iPhone Delete Old Screenshots Automatically So Your Photos App Doesn’t Turn into a Mess

If you’re like me, you take more than just a few screenshots throughout the day and they quickly pile up on your iPhone. When you take so many pictures on your screen, the Screenshots folder in the Photos app can bloat into three digits if you don’t manage it, and your Recent folder turns into a mess. But there is a trick to controlling screenshots, and you have full control over it.

There is no setting in the Photos app to automatically delete screenshots. This trick uses the built-in automation in the Shortcuts app to remove unwanted screenshots with whatever options you want. You just need to understand the shortcuts a bit to customize them to your liking.

You can now build the entire workflow directly in the automation, or create a shortcut first and then run the automation on that shortcut. If you’re new to using shortcuts, you might want the latter, and you can download a basic shortcut template below. This guide assumes you’re on iOS 15, but shortcut actions will also work on iOS 14.

• Install Shortcut: Auto Remove Screenshots

Whether you want to create a shortcut from scratch or use the one above, you need to follow all the steps below to customize everything to suit your needs. It’s worth noting that there are other shortcuts for deleting screenshots, but none of them did what I wanted.

Save screenshots from the last 7 days.

First, it uses the Find Photos action to find All Photos on your iPhone. It is then configured to filter out everything that is not a screenshot. There is another filter that only includes screenshots taken in the last week. This way, everything you did in the previous seven days will remain intact. This gives you a week for each screenshot to decide if you want to save it or not.

Simple step by step assembly guide:

1. Start a new label.
2. Add a Find Photo action.
3. Click “Add Filter”in the action field.
4. Click “Album”and change to “Screenshot”.
5. Click Add Filter again.
6. Click “Album”and select “Date taken”.
7. To do this, click “enabled”and change the value to “latest”.
8. To do this, click “years”and change the value to “weeks”(or another period of time).
9. Tap the space between “last time”and “weeks”and add “1”(or some other number).
10. Press “Done”on your keyboard.

Filter important screenshots

The second action is also “Find Photos”. As before, it’s set to the “All Photos”location. If you’re creating this yourself and posting after the first action above, click “Photos”in the action field and change it to “All Photos”. Otherwise, it will only look at screenshots from the last seven days, and not everything before that.

The first filter of the second action highlights screenshots from your library, and the second filter excludes everything that was found by the first block of the “Find Photos”action.

I also have filters for Not Hidden, in case you hide important screenshots in your hidden Album, and Dislike, since you probably want to keep them. Another filter excludes everything I put in my own Saved Screenshots album, but you can choose any album as a safe zone. You can also add as many albums as you like, but you will have to do them one by one.

Simple step by step assembly guide:

1. Add another Find Photo action after the first one.
2. Click “Photo”in action and click “Clear Variable”.
3. Click “Add Filter”in the action field.
4. Click “Album”and change to “Screenshot”.
5. Click Add Filter again.
6. Click “Album”and select “Date taken”.
7. To do this, click “on”and change the value to “was before”.
8. Press and hold the current date and change the value to “Select Magic Variable”.
9. Tap the Photos variable below the first Find Photos action field.
10. Click Add Filter again.
11. Click “Album”and change the value to “Not Hidden”.
12. Click Add Filter again.
13. Click “Album”and change to “Unfavourite”.
14. Click Add Filter again.
15. Keep “Album”there and click “yes”next to it, then change to “none”.
16. To do this, click “Recent”and select the album you want to avoid.
17. Optional: Repeat 14-16 to add more albums if needed.
18. Optional: Click “Sort By”, choose what you want and customize the “Order”.
19. Optional: Enable “Limit”and select the maximum number of screenshots you want the shortcut to be removed when triggered.

Set remaining screenshots to be deleted

Now it remains only to force the shortcut to remove everything that it pulled out of the filters. “Delete Photos”is the action you want and should be done at the end of the workflow. To make sure everything works, click the Play button at the bottom.

If you get an error when launching the shortcut, go back to the second Find Photos activity and add a limit to the number of screenshots it can work with at once. I found that 50 is the maximum you can get before you get an error.

Simple step by step assembly guide:

1. Add a Delete Photo action to the end of the workflow.
2. Click the play button at the bottom to make sure it works.
3. If you receive an error: add a constraint to the second field of the “Find Photos”action.

Interact with the privacy request

iOS 15 has a new “Privacy”setting for individual shortcuts, and it’s enabled by default. So when you play with the shortcut, you will get a privacy message, which can be very helpful or very annoying, depending on your point of view.

In the privacy prompt, it will offer you the options to “Show”, “Remove”and “Don’t delete”. If you have “Allow deletion without confirmation”enabled in the shortcut’s advanced settings, you will also see “Always delete”.

• “Always delete”will stop the privacy prompt from being displayed in the future, and the shortcut will be able to delete items without your confirmation.
• “Remove”will simply remove all displayed images.
• “Show”allows you to get a better look at each screenshot you’re about to erase. If there is one or two images you want to remove from the many that show up, you can use the generic sheet for each to “Save Image”which will put a new date stamp so that the first action in the label will exclude it by seven days.
• “Do not delete”is problematic. If you want to keep all the images shown, you must click on this option, but this also disables the shortcut from deleting any images in the future. At least until you change its privacy settings back to “Ask to delete”or “Delete without asking”. It is impossible to remove everything shown, while retaining the main parameter – ask or not ask.

If you don’t want to delete anything and don’t want to disable the launch of the shortcut, just click outside the menu to close it and nothing will change.

In iOS 14, you will simply see a prompt asking you to allow labels to remove the number of images found that match the criteria. You can “Delete”or “Don’t Allow”, and unlike iOS 15, opting out of deleting images won’t prevent the prompt from appearing in the future.

Create Automation

You can stop right here if you just want to run the shortcut manually to clean up old screenshots. You can play a shortcut from the Shortcuts app, ask Siri to launch it, or “Add to Home Screen”to have an icon that you can quickly tap on the Home screen.

If you want to automate things, start a new personal automation in the Automation tab. This is where you set your trigger. You can set up automatic deletion of screenshots at a specific time, daily, weekly or monthly. Or you can set it up to fire every time you open the Photos app. You can even set NFC tags, focuses, emails, messages, and shortcut launch power. It all depends on you, because any of them will work.

I just adjust mine every time I turn on airplane mode.

Simple step by step assembly guide:

1. Create a new personal automation in the Automation tab.
2. Select the trigger of your choice and customize it.
3. Click “Next”to continue.
4. Either create the entire shortcut from scratch in the Actions screen, or add a Run Shortcut action.
5. Click “Shortcut”in the action field.
6. Select the shortcut you downloaded or created to delete screenshots.
7. Click “Next”to continue.
8. Turn off “Ask before launch”and confirm your choice.
9. Click “Finish”and that’s it.

Enjoy your new screenshot Automatic deletion

This shortcut and automation is relatively simple, and there’s a lot you can do to customize it beyond what’s already been discussed. For example, you can have it show you all the screenshots it finds before it deletes them, so you can uncheck the ones you want to keep and send the rest to the privacy window where you make the final decision.