How to find your largest videos and photos on iPhone

This is a real gap, not a settings menu you missed. Apple's Photos app has never had a sort-by-size option, for videos or photos. If your storage is full and you suspect a handful of large videos are the cause, there's no built-in screen that just lists them for you, biggest first.

What you can actually do

Settings → General → iPhone Storage

This shows how much space Photos is using in total, alongside every other app. It's a good sanity check — if Photos is 40 GB and everything else is 20 GB combined, you know where to look — but it doesn't break that 40 GB down into individual videos.

Media Types → Videos

Open Photos, go to Media Types, tap Videos. Every video is a thumbnail with its length printed on it, and you can scroll for anything showing a long runtime. This is the closest built-in option to what you want, but length is a proxy for size, not a measurement of it. A shaky nine-minute video at standard resolution might be smaller than a fifteen-second clip shot in 4K at 60 frames per second. You're estimating, not sorting.

The Files app

If you've saved videos into iCloud Drive or a specific folder rather than into Photos — downloaded from Messages, exported from an editing app — the Files app shows file sizes and can sort a folder by size. This only covers files stored there, not your camera roll.

Sort by size, which is the thing you actually wanted

Every option above is an estimate. The direct version is a size sort, and it is the reason Slean exists — it started because I wanted to order my own camera roll biggest file first and the Photos app would not do it.

Slean sorts the whole library largest file first, with the exact size printed on every thumbnail. Add the media-type filter and you are looking at nothing but videos, in order, worst offender at the top. Add a size range on top of that — a minimum of 200 MB, say — and the list is only the ones worth acting on. It takes about thirty seconds and it usually turns up three or four clips you had forgotten filming.

What about large photos?

Same gap, smaller stakes. A normal iPhone photo is a couple of megabytes and a thousand of them will not fill a phone the way one long 4K clip does. But there are exceptions worth finding: ProRAW and RAW files can run 25 to 75 MB each, panoramas are enormous, long screenshots of whole web pages are surprisingly heavy, and anything imported from a real camera is in a different weight class from a camera-roll snap.

Photos gives you no way to find these either — there is no size column, no sort, and no filter. The same size sort answers both questions at once: set the media filter to photos, order largest first, and the RAW files and panoramas come to the top. If you shoot ProRAW and have never looked at this, it is usually a surprise.

Compressing instead of deleting

Not every large video is disposable. If it's a video you actually want to keep — a kid's first steps, a performance — compressing it can return most of the space without giving up the file.

Slean's compression shows a size preview before you commit, and you choose whether to keep the original alongside the compressed version or replace it. That choice matters: replacing is where the space actually comes back, but it's also the point where you lose the source file, so it's worth being sure first.

What compression costs: it reduces bitrate, which shows up most in motion and low light — footage that was already slightly soft or dim will look softer or dimmer after. Fast motion can pick up compression artefacts it didn't have before. For a video you'll watch on a phone screen, this is rarely noticeable. Blown up on a TV, or if you plan to edit the footage later, it's a real trade-off, not a free win.

Android hides its large files in a different place, and the order of what to clear first is worth following there too. Here is the Android version.