Keep Screenshots Out of Your Photo Library
Screenshots clutter a photo library and mislead date sorting. How to tell them apart from photos and move them into their own folder in bulk.
Scroll through your photo library and every third image is a screenshot. A boarding pass, a recipe, a chat, a map, a meme. They were useful for a day. Now they sit between the holiday photos forever, and there are thousands of them.
Why they end up there
Phones save screenshots into the camera roll, or into a Screenshots folder that the gallery merges into the main view. Google Photos backed them up along with everything else, and a Takeout export hands them back mixed in with the photos, often in the same "Photos from 2019" folders.
They also confuse date sorting. Screenshots are PNGs with no EXIF date, so after a copy they carry only the file date, which is today. A library sorted by date gets a clump of screenshots at the top.
Telling a screenshot from a photo
A few signs, in order of reliability.
The filename. Screenshot_20190714-110530.png on Android, Screenshot 2019-07-14 at 11.05.30.png on a Mac, Screen Shot on older Macs, IMG_1234.PNG on an iPhone where the PNG extension is the giveaway, since iPhone photos are JPEG or HEIC.
The format. PNG in a camera roll is almost always a screenshot. Cameras do not shoot PNG.
The dimensions. Screenshots match the device's screen exactly: 1080 by 2340, 1170 by 2532, 2560 by 1440. Photos have camera sensor dimensions: 4032 by 3024, 4000 by 3000.
The EXIF. Photos have a camera make and model. Screenshots have none, or a software tag saying which system took them.
Takeout adds one more: Google's .json sidecar for a screenshot has no geoData with real coordinates and often a title matching the screenshot filename.
Moving them by hand
For filenames, a file manager search does it. Search the library for Screenshot, select all, move to a Screenshots folder. Then search for *.PNG and review what is left, since iPhone screenshots do not say so in the name.
On Linux or macOS, find handles it:
find . -iname 'Screenshot*' -exec mv {} ./Screenshots/ \;For the PNG case, exiftool can select by dimensions and format:
exiftool -if '$FileType eq "PNG" and not $Make' -r -Directory=Screenshots .That moves PNGs without a camera make into a Screenshots folder. Check the folder afterwards; a scanned drawing saved as PNG would land there too.
Documents are the same problem
Photos of receipts, whiteboards, forms, book pages and posters clutter the library the same way. They are real camera photos with EXIF, so the tricks above do not catch them. They look different, though: flat, rectangular, mostly text, little colour. Telling them apart takes either a person or something that looks at the picture.
Doing it with the app
Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer sorts screenshots and documents into their own folders during an organizing run. Both are optional and off if you do not want them.
With screenshot sorting on, files recognised as screenshots, by name, format and dimensions, go to a Screenshots folder instead of the date folders, and get a _Screenshot suffix on the filename so they stay identifiable wherever they go next. They still get a date, from the Takeout sidecar or the file, so they sort sensibly inside their own folder.
With document sorting on, photos that look like scans, receipts, whiteboards and paperwork go to a Documents folder. This one works from the image itself rather than the filename, so it catches phone photos of paper that have perfectly normal EXIF. It will occasionally misjudge a very flat, text-heavy photo. Dry run shows what would go where before anything moves.
The rest of the library gets the normal treatment: real dates from sidecars or EXIF, readable names, Year/Month or whatever folder layout you pick. Offline, on macOS, Windows and Linux. Free for 500 photos, $9.99 one-time for unlimited.
Frequently asked questions
Should I delete screenshots or keep them?
Keep them in their own folder for a year, then look. Most will be worthless by then and easy to delete as a block. A few, such as a receipt or a confirmation, you will be glad to have.
Will a screenshot of a photo get sorted as a screenshot?
Yes, because it is one: it has the screen's dimensions and no camera data. If it is the only copy of a picture you care about, move it back by hand.
How does Google Photos handle screenshots?
On the phone it shows a Screenshots album and can hide it from the main view. In a Takeout export that album is a folder, but the same files also appear in the year folders, so the mixing comes back.
What about screen recordings?
They are videos with the screen's dimensions and no camera metadata. The app treats videos separately and does not sort recordings into the Screenshots folder. Search for Screen Recording or .mp4 files with screen dimensions to find them.