One screen recording of a bug, a game clip, a tutorial you meant to send once — each one weighs 50-200MB. Five of them outweigh a thousand photos. Here’s how to delete screen recordings on your iPhone in bulk.
The quick answer
Open Photos > Albums > Media Types > Screen Recordings, tap Select, and delete the ones you no longer need. Then empty Recently Deleted to reclaim the space. To catch the ones hiding among regular videos, filter by video size — a cleaner like Odoa sorts your biggest files first, entirely on your device.
Step 1: Delete them in bulk from the Screen Recordings album
Apple groups them for you:
- Open Photos > Albums.
- Scroll to Media Types and tap Screen Recordings.
- Tap Select, tap the recordings you don’t need, then tap the trash icon.
- Confirm the deletion.
What this gives you: every screen recording in one place, deletable in under a minute. What this does not give you: a sense of which ones are the biggest. For that, sort by size (Step 2).
If you don’t see the album, you have no screen recordings saved — or they’re saved as regular videos in an older iOS version. Check the Videos album instead.
Step 2: Catch the biggest ones hiding among videos
Screen recordings mix with camera videos and downloads. The fastest triage is by size: a 3-minute recording at 1080p often beats 500 photos. In Odoa, open the video filter and sort by most storage first — the top 5 files usually hold half the recoverable space. Swipe left to delete, right to keep. See the full method in how to delete videos taking up space on iPhone.
This is the same logic as a full camera roll cleanup: biggest files first, bursts second, screenshots last.
Step 3: Empty Recently Deleted
Deleted recordings move to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted for up to 30 days and still take up space. Open that album, tap Select, then Delete All. The full walkthrough is in how to clear Recently Deleted on iPhone.
Stop them piling up again
Screen recordings accumulate because they’re fire-and-forget: record, share, forget. Two habits fix it:
- Delete the recording right after you send it. If you need it later, it’s in the chat history anyway.
- Once a month, open the Screen Recordings album and clear it. It takes 30 seconds when it’s a habit, 30 minutes when it’s a year of backlog.
Why on-device matters here
Screen recordings often contain logins, messages, banking screens — exactly what you don’t want uploaded to a server for “AI analysis”. Odoa processes everything on your iPhone: nothing is uploaded, which is also why it’s among the safest photo cleaners to run. Compare options in best photo cleaner apps for iPhone.
The bottom line
Screen Recordings album for the bulk delete, size-sorted pass for the hidden giants, Recently Deleted to reclaim the space. Five minutes, often a gigabyte or more back.