Your gallery is full of screenshots of IDs, codes and bank details

A screenshot is the quickest way to keep anything: a boarding pass, a booking reference, a bank transfer confirmation, a photo of your driving license, the code a website told you to save. It’s so quick that nobody organizes them. Months later, the screenshots album holds a slice of your life a stranger would find very useful, sitting next to your holiday photos, often synced to the cloud and visible to anyone you hand your phone to.

What tends to pile up

Scroll your screenshots and you’ll likely find some of these:

• ID documents: passport pages, driving licenses, residence permits, student cards.
• Money: bank transfer confirmations with account numbers, card details from an online order, balances.
• Codes: recovery codes, two-step verification backup codes, Wi-Fi passwords, door codes.
• Travel: boarding passes with booking references, hotel confirmations with your address.
• Health: test results, prescriptions, appointment letters.
• Conversations: screenshots of private chats, sometimes other people’s.

Each is a small risk. Together, they’re a ready-made identity kit.

What to do now

1. Open the screenshots album. Both iPhone and Android gallery apps group screenshots into their own album. On Android they’re usually also in a Screenshots folder on the phone; see where Android screenshots are saved.

2. Go through it newest first. Most screenshots are only useful for a day or two. Select everything you no longer need and delete it.

3. Empty the deleted folder. Deleted photos wait there for weeks, on the phone and in your backup. Empty it, or delete those items from it individually.

4. Move what you need to keep. ID scans, health letters and anything else sensitive belongs somewhere with its own lock. See storing ID and passport scans safely.

5. Replace screenshots of passwords and codes. Put them in a password manager, then delete the screenshots. For recovery codes, a printed copy in a safe place works well.

6. Check your backup. If your photo backup includes screenshots, deleting them on the phone (and emptying the deleted folder) usually removes them from the backup too. Check in your cloud account’s web view that they’re gone.

What doesn’t help

• Hiding screenshots in the gallery’s hidden album. It keeps them out of sight, but they still open with your phone’s lock and stay in your backup.
• Cropping out the sensitive part. The original is often kept and can be restored by the editing tool.
• Leaving it for one big cleanup later. The pile only grows.

Screenshots of other people

Screenshots of chats, profiles and group messages often include other people’s names, numbers and private words. They didn’t choose to be in your gallery or your backup. Unless you’re keeping a conversation as evidence, delete these once they’ve served their purpose. If you are keeping evidence, keep it together, in one private place, with the dates written down.

A habit that keeps it tidy

• When you take a screenshot to keep, ask whether it belongs in a wallet, a password manager or a document folder instead.
• Once a month, spend two minutes deleting old screenshots.
• On Android, some phones let you exclude the screenshots folder from photo backup; see stopping Android backing up private photos.

Where a vault helps

A vault gives sensitive screenshots a home away from the gallery and the photo backup. Silo, coming soon to iPhone and Android, imports chosen screenshots, checks each encrypted copy, then offers to remove the originals. With Pro, it also holds PDFs and other documents.