Best Apps to Find Large Videos on iPhone in 2026

Why do a few videos hold more storage than thousands of photos?

Because the unit sizes are not comparable. A still photo from an iPhone is measured in megabytes, while a few minutes of 4K footage is measured in gigabytes, so a single unrewatched clip can weigh more than a whole month of photos. That asymmetry decides the strategy: clearing a thousand near-duplicate photos is satisfying and reclaims comparatively little, while removing three unwatched screen recordings can reclaim more in one action. The tool worth having therefore ranks video by file size, and that single sort is the feature to look for.

Can the Photos app find your largest videos?

Not by size, which is the whole difficulty. The Photos app does collect every video in one place under Collections, Media Types, Videos, and Apple documents storage recommendations and per-app usage under Settings, General, iPhone Storage — enough to tell you that Photos is the problem, but not which items inside it are. The Media Types album is ordered chronologically, so identifying the heaviest files means opening them one at a time. Nothing in iOS ranks your videos largest-first, and that gap is the entire reason this category of app exists.

Which iPhone apps find large videos, and which can shrink them?

Two of the apps here surface video by file size as a category of its own — PhotoBroom’s Large Videos and CleanMy®Phone’s Largest Videos — while the rest reach video through duplicate, lookalike or compression flows instead, and the split that matters is not how they find it but what they can do next. The table’s conclusion in one sentence: PhotoBroom gives the most precise size control and shows every result free, and it is the only one of the five third-party apps here that cannot reclaim space without deleting the video.

Where PhotoBroom loses: compression keeps the video

Compression is the row PhotoBroom cannot win, and for a large number of people it is the row that decides the purchase. A cleaner that compresses re-encodes a video to a smaller file and leaves it in the library, so the wedding footage stays and the gigabytes come back. MacPaw goes one step further with Live Photo to still conversion, which reclaims the motion component of a Live Photo while keeping the picture.

PhotoBroom does not compress, convert or re-encode anything. For someone whose position is “I need 20 GB back and I refuse to delete a second of it”, PhotoBroom is the wrong tool and CleanMy®Phone, Cleanup or Cleaner Kit is the right one.

Two cautions belong with that recommendation, because compression is lossy by definition. Users have reported that Smart Cleaner’s compression damaged their Live Photos and rewrote every timestamp to the compression date, which destroys the chronological order of a library. And an independent hands-on review of Cleanup found some short clips taking over ten minutes to compress with a stuttery interface on large video libraries. Compress a copy of anything irreplaceable before compressing the original.

What does PhotoBroom’s free tier allow for large videos?

Nothing is locked. The full size-sorted Large Videos list is visible to every user, along with the size threshold control, duration and exact file size on each cell, and all six other categories. What PhotoBroom meters is deletion: 50 items of any type per calendar day, plus a separate allowance of 2 large videos, resetting at device-local midnight. Marking something as kept is free and never counts against either number.

That two-video allowance is the honest weak point of this page. If the phone holds thirty 4K clips, a free user is looking at more than a fortnight of daily sessions. MacPaw’s own knowledge base documents Largest Videos as one of the free categories in CleanMy®Phone and attaches no daily deletion allowance to it, so a non-paying user chasing oversized video gets further there than with PhotoBroom’s free tier. PhotoBroom Pro removes the daily cap and is sold on yearly and weekly cadences as well as a one-time lifetime purchase; the free tier is genuinely permanent, but it is metered, and this is the category where the meter bites hardest. The full free-tier picture across the category is in what you actually get free from iPhone photo cleaners.

What actually counts as a large video?

What counts as large depends on your library, which is why a fixed threshold is the wrong design. PhotoBroom’s Large Videos default is 100 MB, tunable anywhere from 25 MB to 5 GB: raise it on a phone full of 4K footage so the list shows only the genuinely heavy files, lower it on a phone where a hundred medium clips are the actual problem. Every cell shows duration and exact file size before you decide, so none of the decision is guesswork — which matters, because a long video you would miss and a long video you have never rewatched look identical in a grid of thumbnails.

When should you pick one of the others instead?

Pick CleanMy®Phone when your storage problem is video-shaped and you do not want to delete anything: compression and Live Photo conversion reclaim gigabytes while keeping every memory, its Largest Videos surface is free, and it installs on iOS 17 where PhotoBroom will not. Pick Cleanup when the pile is mixed — a bloated inbox, a messy contacts list and videos you want shrunk rather than removed — and you can live without an iPad build. Pick Cleaner Kit for the same breadth plus a Face ID-locked vault, on the same iPad caveat: its listing carries no iPad build either. Weigh its App Privacy card, which declares Purchases, Location, Identifiers, Usage Data and Diagnostics as used to track you across other companies’ apps.

Pick Smart Cleaner in one specific case: an iPhone too old for iOS 18. Smart Cleaner runs on iOS 14, PhotoBroom requires iOS 18.0, so on that hardware PhotoBroom is not an option at all. Weigh it against the review corpus, where getting back out is the dominant theme: just under half the negative reviews sampled touch the trial, the subscription or cancelling, and reviewers who cannot find how to cancel outnumber those describing a charge or a refund by roughly five to one. The cancel path is in iOS Settings, where Apple puts it for every app; what the developer chose is an entry flow whose trial is itself a subscription. The Smart Cleaner comparison covers that in detail. And if the videos are ones you want to keep, the real comparison is not between apps at all: it is buying more iCloud storage or cleaning up.

Why is your iPhone full of videos you never recorded?

Two of the heaviest things in a camera roll were never filmed on purpose, and both are worth separating from the large-video pile because neither involves a judgment call. Screen Recordings are usually long, heavy and watched exactly once, and iOS tags them at capture time, so detection is exact rather than inferred. Short Videos is the other half: accidental clips below a duration you set, three seconds by default, with Live Photos excluded automatically so a real memory is never swept up with the misfires.

Nobody rewatches a screen recording of a train timetable.

That capture-time tag is the rare thing on this page that comes from the file itself. Almost everything said above about the other apps is reported, and the reporting has edges worth naming before you act on it. No app was installed for a controlled compression test, so every compression claim above comes from independent hands-on reviews and user reports, attributed and dated where it sits. The exact free-tier allowances for Cleaner Kit and Cleanup are documented nowhere, which is why no number is published for either. And whether Smart Cleaner transmits any media off the device is simply not established: its App Store label declares User Content in the form of Photos or Videos as collected for Analytics and App Functionality, which is a developer’s own declaration and is reported here as exactly that — never as evidence of an upload.