How to Remove Large Videos from iPhone and iPad for More Space

Welcome to another Momentum 360 weekly blog! In this post, we will show you how to find and remove large videos from your iPhone or iPad so you can free up valuable space.

These devices can hold just about everything, including photos, clips, apps, music you downloaded, podcasts, and more. Out of all these, videos usually take the biggest bite out of your storage. Apple records and saves them in high quality, which means the files can grow fast. 

The problem is that Apple doesn’t make it very straightforward to locate the largest files. In this guide, we’ll point out where the system falls short, explain how you can find these large videos, and show you the easiest ways to delete them, whether they sit in the Photos app or the Files app.

Can You Find Large Videos on iPhone or iPad?

Apple ships new features with each iOS and iPadOS release, but tools that help you find large videos still fall short. The Photos app offers no filter or sort by size for videos. You can scroll the grid, but the size stays hidden, so you guess which clip eats the most space.

The Files app does better. In list view, you sort items by Size and see the biggest clips at once. This view only covers files that sit in Files or a connected cloud drive. It does not touch items inside Photos or third-party apps.

You can also open Settings > General > iPhone Storage to see recommendations, yet it still does not rank your Photos videos by size. That doesn’t mean you, as the device owner, have no way to find and clear them out. The following sections will walk through the options step by step.

How to Find and Remove Large Videos from the Photos App on iPhone and iPad

iPhones and iPads can store videos in several locations, but the bulk usually sits inside the Photos app. This is where you keep the clips that matter most—those estate videos you captured on a good day, vacation moments, quick work projects, or even apartment tours for clients. Since it holds the majority of your media, this is the best place to start.

While the Photos app has no direct filter for sorting by size, you still have a few ways to spot and remove the heaviest files. Some methods work within the app itself, and others involve third-party tools that make the process faster. We will go through each one so you can free up space without losing track of what’s important.

1. Remove Large Videos from Photos on iPhone and iPad Manually

The Photos app offers no option to filter videos by size, but you can still check each one individually. If a clip looks too large and you no longer need it, you can delete it on the spot. This approach feels counterintuitive and takes the most time. Imagine scrolling through several thousand videos and checking them one by one—how long would it take? A few days? Still, it works, and sometimes it’s the only way to be sure.

To check a video’s size and delete it:

1. Open Photos and find the video you want to review.
2. Tap the “i” (Info) icon at the bottom of the screen.
3. Look at the file size shown in the details.
4. If it’s larger than you want to keep, tap the trash can icon to delete it.








If you’d rather save time, skip the size check and focus on the videos with the longest playtimes. Those tend to be the largest files. Or, move on to the next methods we cover, which handle the cleanup much faster and with less effort.

2. Use Cleaner Apps to Delete Large Videos

If the manual method feels too slow or impractical, the best alternative is to use cleaner apps for iPhone and iPad. These tools exist for one main reason: to quickly locate certain categories of files and help you delete them. Finding large videos fits perfectly into that purpose.

The challenge is that with so many apps available now, picking the right one can feel overwhelming. A simple way to start is to search for the best iPad cleaner apps (or iPhone) and browse through one of the top selections. Most of them do a decent job.

For this article, we’ll use the Clever Cleaner app as an example. It’s free, appears frequently in recommendations, and works on both iPhone and iPad, which makes it a universal choice. The app offers several cleaning tools, and one of them, Heavies, focuses specifically on large videos. We’ll explain the others in a moment.

To find and delete large videos with Clever Cleaner:

1. Open the App Store on your iPhone or iPad, search for Clever Cleaner, and install it.
2. Launch the app and allow it to access your Photos library.
3. At the bottom, you’ll see four main categories: Similars, Heavies, Swipe, Screenshots, and Lives. Tap Heavies.
4. You will see your videos sorted from largest to smallest, with the file size and duration listed. Tap any video to open the selection screen. Swipe left or right to preview and decide whether to keep or remove it.
5. To delete multiple files at once, tap Select All to highlight every video in the list. The app will display the total space you will free up just above the Move to Trash button.







6. When ready, tap Move to Trash. At the bottom, tap Empty Trash to send the files to the Recently Deleted album in Photos.

Other useful features in Clever Cleaner:

• Similars – finds duplicates and visually similar photos, groups them, and highlights the best shot so you can delete the rest.
• Swipe – shows your photos grouped by the month they were added. You move left to delete or right to keep, so clearing out old shots takes seconds.
• Screenshots – pulls every screenshot from your Photos library into one place. You can remove them all with a single tap or go through and delete only the ones you don’t need.
• Lives – changes Live Photos into regular still images. You decide whether to keep only the new still version or store it alongside the original.

To clear the most storage, try each of these tools in turn. It’s common to free up several gigabytes in just minutes, without the endless scroll through your entire Photos library.

3. Remove Large Videos on iPhone and iPad with the Shortcuts App

If you don’t want to install a cleaner app but also can’t imagine deleting videos one by one, there’s another option. You can use the Shortcuts app that comes preinstalled on most iPhones and iPads. Shortcuts lets you create automated actions—Apple calls them “commands”—that run with a single tap. You set the conditions, and the app carries out the task for you.

With the right setup, you can make a shortcut that searches your library for long videos and deletes them in bulk. The drawback is that you need to choose the parameters yourself, and there’s no direct “sort by size” function. Still, it works well if you know roughly which videos you want to target. Here’s one example you can follow:

1. Open Shortcuts on your iPhone or iPad and tap the “+” icon to start a new shortcut.
2. In the search bar, type Find Photos, then select it from the list.
3. In the Find Photos block, tap Add Filter and set it to Media Type is Video.
4. Add another filter: Duration is greater than and choose a number of seconds or minutes that makes sense for your needs. (You can’t filter by file size, but longer videos usually take up more space.)
5. Search for Delete Photos and add it to the shortcut.
6. Tap the shortcut name at the top, rename it to something like Delete Large Videos, and hit Done.
7. Press the play icon to run it. The app will show all videos matching your filters, and you can choose to delete them or preview each one first. This method takes a little time to set up, but once you’ve saved the shortcut, you can run it anytime without scrolling through your library.













Every method here ends the same way: the videos go to Recently Deleted, not off the device. They remain for 30 days. Apple keeps this window as insurance against mistakes. Until you clear that album, those files still count toward your storage. Open Recently Deleted, tap Select, choose the items, and tap Delete All to reclaim the space today.

How to Remove Large Videos from the Files App on iPhone or iPad

If your large videos are stored in the Files app rather than Photos, you have it easy. Apple already includes a way to sort everything by file size, which means the largest videos rise straight to the top. No extra downloads, no special commands—just the built-in tools.

1. Open Files on your iPhone or iPad and head into the folder where your videos are saved.
2. Tap the three dots in the corner, and if you’re still in grid view, switch over to List View, as it makes the next step easier.
3. From there, choose Sort By, then pick Size. Now the largest files are right at the top.
4. Mark the ones you want to delete, then tap the trash icon.

But don’t think they’re gone for good yet. Just like in Photos, Files sends them to Recently Deleted, where they’ll hang around for 30 days. They still take up space while they sit there. If you need that storage back now, open Recently Deleted, select what’s inside, and clear it out on the spot.

Conclusion

We’ve covered several ways to clear large videos from your iPhone or iPad, no matter where they’re stored. If you want to avoid local cleanup altogether, you could also move your library to iCloud. That extra cloud storage takes some of the weight off your device and can keep things running smoother.For the future, it’s easier to delete videos right after you no longer need them instead of letting them pile up. Post them to Instagram or YouTube, share them with friends or colleagues, and then remove them from your phone or tablet. A few quick deletions along the way can save you from a full storage purge later.












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