Although I appreciate Apple’s desire to keep the stock Photos app as simple as possible to use, there are a number of surprising omissions.
One of them is that there’s no way to sort or filter videos by length or file size. That’s a pretty fundamental missing feature if you’re trying to free up iPhone storage by deleting some of your largest unwanted videos. Fortunately, there’s a Shortcut available to do the job …
It’s all too easy to end up shooting video that you may want to watch once or twice soon afterwards, or share to social media, but will never need again. Since iOS seems to randomly choose what it keeps downloaded on the phone, lengthy videos can easily eat up iPhone storage.
I didn’t necessarily expect to be able to filter by file size or video length on my iPhone, but I did think the Mac Photos app would offer that capability. Turns out I was wrong.
Fortunately, Reddit user FrozenMaize has created a Shortcut you can use to add all of your longer videos to an album. You can edit the shortcut to specify the length of the video in minutes and the name of the album in which you want to store them.
They say that it runs quickly even with thousands of video files, and that was indeed my experience. Once you have all of those videos in a single album, it’s then trivial to browse through them and identify the ones you no longer need.
If you found other useful Shortcuts to fill surprising gaps in Apple’s stock app capabilities, please share them in the comments.
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
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