How to Find Large Videos on iPhone

Videos consume significantly more storage than photos. A single minute of 4K video at 60 frames per second can be over 400MB. On newer iPhone Pro models, ProRes video can reach several gigabytes per minute. Even a handful of long recordings can fill a substantial portion of your storage.

The challenge is that videos can be hard to find and assess in the Photos app — there's no built-in way to sort your video album by file size directly. Here's how to locate your largest videos and decide what to do with them.

1. Check iPhone Storage to Understand the Scale

Before diving into your video library, get a high-level view of how much storage photos and videos are using:

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap General → iPhone Storage.
3. Look at the Photos row in the app list. This shows the combined storage used by all photos and videos in your library.

If Photos is your largest storage category — which it often is — videos are likely a significant contributor, especially if you shoot 4K or record long clips.

2. Find Videos in the Photos App

The Photos app organizes all your videos in one album, which is a helpful starting point:

1. Open the Photos app.
2. Tap Albums at the bottom.
3. Under Media Types, tap Videos. This shows all videos in your library.
4. Each video thumbnail shows its duration. Tap a video to see it and check its file information.

The Videos album doesn't have a built-in sort-by-size option. You can browse visually, but for large libraries with many videos, it can be time-consuming to find the biggest files this way.

3. Review Before Deleting

Before removing a video, it's worth a quick review to make sure you actually want to delete it:

• Watch the video briefly to confirm what it contains. Old test recordings, accidental recordings, and duplicate clips are usually safe to delete.
• Check if it's backed up. If you use iCloud Photos with the original uploaded to iCloud, or have backed up to a computer, you may have a copy elsewhere even after deleting from your iPhone.
• Consider Recently Deleted. Deleted videos go to the Recently Deleted album for 30 days. If you realize you made a mistake, you can recover the video from there within that window.

For videos that contain important moments — family events, trips, occasions you can't recreate — make sure you have a backup before deleting from your device.

4. Use Photo Clean to Find Large Videos

Photo Clean can help you identify large videos in your photo library so you can review them and decide what to remove. Rather than scrolling through the Videos album manually, Photo Clean shows videos sorted by size — so you can see the largest ones first and work through them efficiently.

Here's how:

1. Open Photo Clean on your iPhone.
2. Tap Large Videos on the main screen.
3. Photo Clean scans your library and lists videos by size, largest first.
4. Review the videos. Tap to preview a video before deciding.
5. Select videos you want to remove and delete them. They'll go to Recently Deleted first, giving you 30 days to recover if needed.

5. Other Ways to Free Up Space

Cleaning up large videos is one piece of the storage puzzle. Here are some related guides:

If photos and videos are your main storage concern, checking for duplicate photos is also worth doing — especially if you use burst mode or iCloud sync across devices. Our guide on how to delete duplicate photos on iPhone walks through how to find and remove them.

For a full overview of how to free up iPhone storage, including apps, downloads, and message attachments, see that guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Videos are often the single fastest way to recover significant storage on an iPhone. A few long 4K clips that you no longer need can free up gigabytes of space with minimal effort.

Take a few minutes to go through your video library periodically — especially after events or trips where you may have recorded a lot. Delete accidental recordings, duplicates, and test clips. For the videos that matter, make sure they're backed up before removing them from your device.