Too many screenshots? Here's a shortcut that will help you manage them better




Save your screenshots to a dedicated album - the mobile spoon

This one started as a grumbling tweet after wasting my morning coffee break cleaning up over 7,500 screenshots from my iPhone photos library. 

Took me a while to realize I'm facing a real problem: 



The comments I got for the tweet and a short Google Search made me realize more people suffer from bad screenshots management on iPhones. 

It was the evidence that this is a real pain that needs to be solved once and for all!


Situation: too many screenshots

I take iPhone screenshots all the time for many reasons: 

  • Exploring products or researching competing apps 
  • When opening bugs and sending them to my team
  • Sharing funny chat moments with friends
  • Catching unique FaceTime moments
  • Funny moments taken from videos 
  • Many more... 

The result? Close to 10,000 screenshots on my iPhone... 


Problem: no easy way to clean up my screenshots

Apple made it easy to see all screenshots in a “Screenshots” album - but the album is overflowed with all kinds of screenshots, so, it’s basically impossible to "delete all" without going over all of them manually. 

Some screenshots are temporary (like bugs I already opened and shared with my team) and some are important (like FaceTime moments with my mom). 


Enter this cool little shortcut: 

How about an iOS shortcut that can be used directly from the screen capture screen, and allows you to move the recently taken screenshot to a dedicated album? 

Yeah, that’s right! 

After failing to find a proper tagging solution (photo tags exist on Mac, but there's no easy way to tag photos on iOS), I decided to go with the album's approach. 

This screenshot grabs the screenshot and moves it to a designated album: Screenshot to keep vs. temporary ones. 

This doesn't prevent them from appearing in the "recent" album (this behavior can't be changed) - but it puts those images in an album of your choice which makes it easier to delete them later. 

I created a few variants of this shortcut: 

  1. Save screenshot to... (opens a few options)
  2. Save to Temp Screenshots (always saves to this album)
  3. Save to Ideas Album (always saves to this album)


Save shortcut to a dedicated album - the mobile spoon

How to use: 

  1. Take a screenshot
  2. Click on the share button 
  3. Select 'Save to Temp Screenshots' (if you can't find it - scroll down and manage your shortcuts)
  4. See configuration popup
  5. Close shortcut (no need to save, because the shortcut already saved it) 



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