Taking screenshots on a Mac is useful for a number of reasons. Whether you need to record message details, make a copy of an order confirmation, record a web chat with a customer service representative, or send a funny meme to your friends.

Screenshots are one of the easiest and quick ways to capture and keep a record of anything you do on your Mac. However, those are potentially large files that can take up lots of space. So, it’s good practice to get rid of them when they become useless. I’m about to show you how to do that, keep reading.

How to take a screenshot on a Mac

Before we get to deleting screenshots, let’s recap how to take a screenshot on a Mac. There are several different keyboard shortcuts depending on what you want to capture.

  • Command-Shift-3 captures the whole screen.
  • Command-Shift-4 allows you to drag crosshairs over the area you want to capture.
  • Command-Shift-4 followed by spacebar allows you to capture a window.
  • Command-Shift-5 allows you to specify what kind of screenshot you want to take, record a video of the screen, set a timer for the screenshot, and choose where to store it.

Where are screenshots stored on the Mac?

By default, screenshots are stored on the Desktop. If you use a recent version of macOS and have Stacks enabled in the Finder, they have their own stack on the Desktop.

Unlike screenshots on an iPhone or iPad, screenshots on a Mac are not added to the library in the Photos app.

How much space do screenshots take up?

The answer to that depends on several things, including the size of the area you’re taking a screenshot of, the resolution of your screen, and the amount of detail in the image. However, expect each screenshot to take up anything from a few K to three or four megabytes. As you can tell, if you have lots of screenshots at 3-4MB each, the amount of space they occupy quickly adds up.

How to delete a screenshot on your Mac manually

There are a number of ways to delete screenshots on your Mac.

  1. For screenshots on the Desktop, click the stack to see all the screenshots.
  2. To delete one, click it and drag it to the Trash, or Control-click it and choose Move to Trash.
  3. To delete more than one, click the Desktop and drag over the screenshots you want to delete until they are all selected. Then, drag them to the Trash.
  4. Empty the Trash.

If you have screenshots stored in other locations, navigate to the folder in which they are stored and drag them to the Trash.

How to delete a lot of screenshots at once

Deleting screenshots one at a time is fine when there are only five. When there are five hundred, and they're scattered across your Desktop, your Downloads folder, and a couple of project folders you'd forgotten about, you need something faster. Finder lets you remove multiple screenshots at once.

  1. Open Finder and press Command-F to start a new search.
  2. Click This Mac, so you're searching everywhere.
  3. Set the first filter to Name, choose Contains, and type Screenshot.
    Filter images by name in Finder
  4. Click the plus button to add a second filter, set it to Kind, and choose Image.
    Filter screenshots by type in Finder
  5. Press Command-A to select everything, then Command-Delete to move everything to the Trash.
  6. Empty the Trash.

Before you get to step 5, switch to Icon view and scroll through what you've found to make sure you’re not deleting something important.

To keep the search around, click Save in the top-right corner of the Finder window and check Add To Sidebar. Finder turns it into a Smart Folder that updates itself, so the next time you want to declutter screenshots, you can easily access them in one place.

However, this only finds screenshots that still have their original name. Anything you've renamed, or anything saved by a third-party capture tool with its own naming, won't show up.

How to automatically delete screenshots on Mac 

There is an even easier way to delete screenshots on your Mac, using a handy tool called CleanMyMac, which specializes in keeping your Mac free from unneeded files. Its My Clutter feature allows you to remove similar and duplicate images, including screenshots.

Get started with a free CleanMyMac trial. Once installed, here’s how to use it to delete screenshots:

  1. Open CleanMyMac and choose My Clutter in the sidebar.
  2. Click Scan — you can change the folder you want to scan.
  3. Click Review All Files. 
  4. Check Duplicates, Similar Images, and Downloads. Write ‘screenshot’ into the search bar to find screenshots. It will identify even those screenshots that have a custom name.
  5. Select files for deletion and click Remove. 

While you can use this tool to remove screenshots, we recommend you to review other similars and duplicates as well and also run a Cleanup scan to delete junk files. 

Want an alternative? Check out the Space Lens feature. It allows you to see clearly where the disk space on your Mac has gone and what’s occupying it.

  1. Go to Space Lens and run a scan.
    Scan completed in Space lens module in CleanMyMac
  2. Double-click the Users folder, then your user folder.
  3. Scroll to the Desktop folder and double-click it
  4. Select the screenshots you want to delete and click Review and Remove.
  5. Once happy with the selection, click Remove.

Why won't my Mac let me delete screenshots?

Every so often, you may run into errors when deleting screenshots. Here are the most common causes.

The operation can't be completed error
  • You don't have permission. Control-click the file, choose Get Info, and scroll down to Sharing & Permissions. Click the padlock, enter your password, and set your account to Read & Write. This often shows up on work Macs and on files copied from an external drive or another computer.
  • The item is in use. This usually means the screenshot is still open somewhere. Preview is the most likely culprit, but it could be a Quick Look window, Mail, or a chat app you dropped the image into earlier. Close whatever's using it, or quit the app entirely (Option-Command-Esc opens the Force Quit menu), and try again.
  • The item is locked. If you can’t delete a screenshot, check if it’s not locked. Control-click the item, choose Get Info, and make sure Locked is unchecked. Then delete it as usual.
  • It's in the Trash, but the Trash won't empty. In Finder, hold down Option and choose Finder > Empty Trash. This lets you clear out everything permanently without confirmation. If the error still won't resolve, restart your Mac and empty the Trash before you open anything else.
  • It keeps reappearing. You're probably deleting a file that lives in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Removing the local copy achieves nothing while the service is busy putting it back. Delete it from the synced folder or from the service's website instead.

How to clear screenshots off your Desktop without deleting them

Sometimes the screenshots aren't the problem; the mess is. Here are a few ways to clear your Desktop without deleting anything.

1. Change default screenshot location

Press Command-Shift-5 to launch the Screenshot app, click Options, and choose a different location under Save to. From then on, every time you take a screenshot, your Mac will save it to a new folder, and your Desktop will stay clean.

2. Move screenshots to a separate folder

If you'd rather keep your screenshots hidden in a folder, press Command-A to select everything, Control-click the selected items, and choose New Folder with Selection. This will create a new folder with your screenshots in it.

3. Use Stacks

Control-click an empty part of the Desktop and choose Use Stacks. macOS gathers everything by kind, so your screenshots collapse into a single pile you can click open when you need it. Control-click again and go to Group Stacks By > Date Added if you'd rather sort them by date.

4. Hide the icons completely

If you want a genuinely empty Desktop (say you're screensharing and don't want your screenshots to be visible), open Terminal and run
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false; killall Finder. Nothing is deleted; it's all still stored in your Desktop folder in Finder; it just stops showing on screen. To bring the icons back, run the same command with true instead of false

Can you recover a screenshot you deleted by mistake?

Recover a screenshot on Mac

Among an obvious option — recovering items from Trash — there's only one easy way to retrieve deleted items, and it requires Time Machine. If you have Time Machine set up, open it, go back to the date before you deleted the files, and restore them.

However, if you don't use Time Machine for backups, you'll need to look at third-party software. Disk Drill is widely recommended: you download it, run a scan, and it'll show you a preview of what files can be recovered.

Deleting screenshots is a good way to free up space on your Mac because it’s easy to take lots of them and forget about them sitting in a Stack on your Desktop. Follow the steps above to delete the ones you don’t need on a regular basis.