Back-to-School Screenshot Reset
Screenshots are information with an expiry date, stored like photographs that never have one. A term’s worth of schedules, reading lists and receipts is the easiest thing to clear.
Clear 300 screenshots that already expired
- Target
- 300 screenshots
- Runs
- August 10 to September 20
- Status
- Running now, to September 20
Get through 300 screenshots, or review the whole seasonal queue. Either one completes the challenge, so you never have to delete a photo you wanted in order to finish.
Start the challenge in CleanorWhy this moment feels timely
A screenshot is a note you filed in the wrong place. Timetables, room numbers, reading lists, confirmation codes and half the syllabus all end up in the camera roll, sitting between the photographs, long after the week they were taken for.
Cleanor pulls every screenshot into one view instead of leaving them scattered through a year of photos. You look at the batch, keep the few that are still live, and the rest go in a single pass.
Where Cleanor helps first
The clutter worth going after this season, and a sensible order to do it in.
What Cleanor looks at
- Screenshots grouped in one place
- Saved images that have gone stale
- Duplicate and near-identical photos
- A camera roll you can scroll again
How to approach it
- Go through screenshots first. They are the one category you can judge in a second, because a timetable from last spring is either useful or it is not.
- Check the dates before the pictures. Anything captured for a deadline that has already passed can go without much thought.
- Leave the actual photographs for a slower pass. Mixing the two is what makes a cleanup get abandoned halfway.
Why this is worth doing now
Nobody takes a screenshot intending to keep it. It is a note with a shelf life of about four days: where the seminar moved to, what the reading was, what time the train leaves. The camera roll makes no distinction between that and a photograph of your family, so it files both forever, and by the end of a year the notes quietly outnumber the pictures.
That makes September the cheapest cleanup of the year. You are about to be handed a new timetable, a new set of deadlines and a new pile of saved images, and the old ones have already expired. Cleanor groups screenshots together so you can judge them as a batch, which takes minutes, rather than meeting them one at a time between holiday photos.
The space matters less than the noise. A camera roll that is two-thirds screenshots is one you stop scrolling through, and the photographs worth having get buried under receipts. Clearing the expired ones puts the pictures back on top. Nothing is removed until you have seen it, so a screenshot you actually still need stays exactly where it is, untouched.
Useful pages around this challenge
What comes up next
The seasonal moments arriving soonest after this one.
Vacation Video Review
One trip can outweigh a year of photographs. A few minutes of 4K footage runs to gigabytes, so the fastest way back to free space is to review the videos first.
Open the challengeStarts in 17 daysClean Before the Transfer
A transfer moves whatever you point it at, including years of duplicates and videos you have never rewatched. Clean the old iPhone first: less to move, and a camera roll you chose.
Open the challengeStarts in 27 daysFall Camera Roll Refresh
October is the last quiet month your camera roll gets. Clearing the summer backlog now is a calm hour’s work; doing it in December means deleting photos at the dinner table.
Open the challenge