How To Delete Screenshots Fast - A Quick Guide

[monozuki]

TL;DR at the bottom.

I had nearly 20k screenshots I wanted to delete and looked like it would take *days* of leaving my laptop on overnight to do it. So I tried to create a workaround and it seems to be working for me. Very much worth the effort as my game was starting to freeze up every time I took a screenshot.

I backed up all my BG3 screenshots to another folder and then deleted all from Steam - took maybe 10 mins total. It can also work if you only want to delete some, but will require a little more fiddling with finding filenames.

* Go to Steam screenshot manager, pick the game you want to delete the screenshots from and press the "Show on Disk" button.

* Close screenshot manager and exit Steam.

* Make note of the parent folder name as shown here[i.imgur.com] - your Game ID number will be different, of course.

* Go up (3 levels) to \Steam\userdata\\[number]\\[number]\ so that in the open window you see the "remote" folder and the screenshots.vdf file.

* Create a copy of the screenshots.vdf and paste it somewhere safe - it's your backup in case something goes wrong (then just paste it back in here to overwrite whatever changes you made).

* Right click the screenshots.vdf and open it in Notepad (might take a while to open, just be patient).

* Once opened, it should look something like this[i.imgur.com].
* The top, leftmost part is the beginning and end of the entire file.
* Moving right, the number circled in red denotes the Game ID (the number you noted down at the very beginning) - this is what we're looking for!

* And circled in blue is where you'll see every screenshot filename, so if you have particular ones you need, Ctrl+F the name and you'll see it there.

* Find your Game ID - the number you noted above, listed somewhere along the list at spacing from the left just like the number circled in red above.

* Now, starting right below that number and moved to the right will be listed all the screenshots saved under that game. If you want to delete them all, just select all of them. If you only want to delete some, have the filename range ready and find them.

* Here's an example of me finding my game ID (red circle) and highlighting the first two screenshot entries for deletion[i.imgur.com]. Once you have them all highlighted, just press delete.

* Data for a single screenshot begins with "XX" and ends with } like so[i.imgur.com] - for each screenshot you want to delete, that's all the data you remove form the file.

* Once you're done, save the file and close it down.

* Now go back into the screenshots folder and either delete them, or move to another folder.

* Run Steam. If you deleted/moved all the screenshots, if you go into that game's library page it should now say there isn't any screenshots!

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TL;DR: Close Steam, go into Steam\userdata\number\number\ folder. Open screenshots.vdf and remove entries for the screenshots you want deleted. Save file. Enter screenshots folder and delete/move all the screenshot files for which entries you just removed. Fire Steam back up. Screenshots should be properly deleted.