Screen Recording Storage Calculator
Turn minutes of phone screen recording into gigabytes. Work out the MB per minute for your resolution, frame rate and codec, see how much recording your free space still holds, and find out what the recordings sitting in your camera roll are costing you in iCloud+ each year.
Screen Recording Storage Calculator
How much recording
All the recordings you are holding onto. On an iPhone, Photos, then Albums, then Screen Recordings shows the album.
Recording setting
60 fps costs about 1.5 times what 30 fps costs for screen capture, not double.
Settings, Camera, Formats. That switch controls screen recordings too, and Most Compatible makes them roughly 1.8 times bigger.
Worth about 1 MB a minute per track. Turning the mic off is a privacy decision, not a storage one.
Android's adb shell screenrecord defaults to 20 Mbps. OBS screen captures usually sit at 6 to 12 Mbps.
Space and habit
iPhone: Settings, General, iPhone Storage. Android: Settings, Storage.
Roughly how many minutes you record in a normal week. Set it to 0 if this is a one-off.
Used to work out whether clearing the recordings would take you down a tier.
What your free space holds
Decimal gigabytes, the way Apple, Google and Samsung label capacity: 1 GB = 1,000 MB.
If you cleared them out
Delete old recordings with Swipe44
Screen recordings sit in the camera roll next to your photos, and they are usually the biggest files on the phone. Every card in the Swipe44 deck carries a size badge, and video gets a play icon, so the expensive ones are obvious as you go. Swipe left and they join the pending pile. The pile clears behind one system confirmation, and the app tells you how much space came back.
The same 45 minutes at other settings
| Setting | MB per minute | Your minutes | Vs. your pick |
|---|
Each row keeps your audio setting and changes only resolution, frame rate, format and motion.
What a minute of screen recording actually costs
At the settings most phones ship with, 1080p at 30 fps in HEVC with system audio, a screen recording writes about 46 MB a minute, or 2.8 GB an hour. Those two numbers sit behind every figure on this page. Here is how they move across the resolutions phones actually produce.
| Resolution | MB per minute (30 fps) | MB per minute (60 fps) | GB per hour (30 fps) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 720p | 25.7 MB | 38.1 MB | 1.5 GB |
| 1080p | 46.0 MB | 68.5 MB | 2.8 GB |
| 1179p (iPhone 15/16, iOS 26) | 61.0 MB | 91.0 MB | 3.7 GB |
| 1290p (Pro Max, iOS 26) | 68.5 MB | 102.2 MB | 4.1 GB |
| 1440p (QHD+ Android) | 83.5 MB | 124.7 MB | 5.0 GB |
| 4K (iPad Pro, Mac, OBS) | 128.5 MB | 192.2 MB | 7.7 GB |
HEVC, normal on-screen motion, system audio. Screen recordings feel out of proportion next to photos because they are: ten minutes at 1080p is about 460 MB, worth roughly two hundred HEIC photos. The catch is that you only ever have a handful of them, so they never look like a problem in a scrolling grid the way a thousand near identical shots do. The screenshot storage calculator covers the other pile of screen captures, the one that is the opposite shape: thousands of items, a few megabytes each.
The four things that set the size
In order of how much they matter:
- Motion, 0.6x to 1.6x. The biggest swing of the four, and the one most storage calculators ignore. Screen recording stores what changed between frames, so a still settings menu is close to free and a game costs full price. Same minute, same resolution, a 2.7x spread between the two ends.
- Format, about 1.8x. HEVC against H.264. On an iPhone this is the High Efficiency versus Most Compatible switch under Settings, Camera, Formats, and it quietly governs screen recordings as well as camera video.
- Frame rate, 1.5x for 60 fps. Not 2x. A screen repeats huge identical regions from one frame to the next, so the extra 30 frames cost far less than the first 30. Camera footage of a moving scene is nearer 2x, which is why advice written for the camera side overstates this one.
- Resolution. More pixels, more data, but compression gets more efficient as resolution climbs, so 4K costs about three times 1080p rather than four.
Everything lands in one line: MB per minute = Mbps x 7.5. That comes straight from bitrate times 60 seconds divided by 8 bits per byte, and it is exact when 1 MB is a million bytes. This page counts 1 GB as 1,000 MB throughout, the way Apple, Google and Samsung label capacity.
The one thing that does not matter is the audio track. AAC at 128 kbps per channel pair is about 1 MB a minute, under 3% of a 1080p recording. Turning the mic off is a privacy call, not a storage one.
iOS 26 made screen recordings bigger
Until iOS 25, a background daemon called replayd capped screen capture at 1,920 pixels on the long side. Every iPhone, 15 or 16 or Pro Max, produced roughly 884x1920 files, 1080p-class no matter how sharp the panel was. iOS 26 dropped that cap and records at full screen resolution instead. The picture is better and the files are around 30 to 50% larger for the same minute, so a Screen Recordings album that spans both eras has two very different price tags in it. If you are still on iOS 25 or earlier, pick the 1080p chip, not 1179p.
Android works differently. The built-in screenrecord command defaults to 20 Mbps at the device's native resolution, records no audio, and stops at three minutes, so the largest file it can produce at defaults is about 450 MB. Samsung's own recorder offers High (1080p), Medium (720p) and Low (480p) under Settings, Advanced features, Screenshots and screen recordings, along with the None, Media, and Media and mic audio options.
Clearing out the Screen Recordings album
The manual route on an iPhone: Photos, then Albums, then Screen Recordings. Select, delete, then empty Recently Deleted, because the space does not come back until that last step or until 30 days pass on their own.
This album is the best place to start a cleanup, and almost nobody starts there. Fewest items, most bytes each. Recordings get made for a reason, the reason expires inside a week, and nothing ever brings you back to them. Meanwhile they sit there syncing at full size to iCloud Photos and counting against your quota exactly like camera video does, which is what the saving figure above is measuring.
Swipe44 handles it the fast way. Every card in the deck carries a size badge, and video assets get a play icon, so a screen recording is visibly the expensive card as you swipe. Right to keep, left to delete. What you mark collects in a pending pile, the whole pile clears behind a single system confirmation, and the app tells you how much space came back. The work happens on the phone, so nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and iCloud originals are never pulled down.
Once the recordings are gone, the iCloud storage cost calculator shows which tier the rest of your library actually needs, and the iPhone storage size calculator puts the whole thing against the size of the phone you bought.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about screen recording storage calculator
How much storage does a screen recording use?
At the usual phone settings (1080p, 30 fps, HEVC) a screen recording costs about 46 MB a minute, so 2.8 GB an hour. Push it to 60 fps and you are nearer 4 GB an hour. Switch the phone from High Efficiency to Most Compatible and that close to doubles again. What is on screen counts for as much as any setting: a minute of a still settings menu can come in under half the size of a minute of a game.
How big is a 10-minute screen recording?
About 460 MB at 1080p, 30 fps, HEVC with system audio. At 60 fps you are near 685 MB, and at 1290p/60 with a game on screen in Most Compatible it passes 2.9 GB. Which is why a handful of forgotten recordings can be the largest single thing in a camera roll. Ten minutes of screen holds about as many megabytes as two hundred HEIC photos.
Why are my screen recordings so large?
Usually frame rate first: 60 fps costs about half again as much as 30. Then format, because a phone set to Most Compatible records H.264 instead of HEVC, roughly 1.8 times the size for the same picture. Then motion. Screen recording compresses by storing only what changed between frames, so a static screen is cheap and a scrolling feed is not. iOS 26 added a fourth reason: Apple dropped the old 1,920 pixel cap, so recordings now come out at the phone's full screen resolution and are visibly bigger than the same recording made a year ago.
Do screen recordings go to iCloud?
Yes. A screen recording is saved into Photos, into an album called Screen Recordings, and if iCloud Photos is on it syncs at full size and counts against your quota exactly like a video from the camera. That is how a few long recordings end up pushing someone off the 50 GB plan and onto 200 GB. The iCloud storage cost calculator works out which tier your whole library needs.
Does turning the microphone off make a screen recording smaller?
Barely. The audio track is AAC at about 128 kbps per channel pair, which works out near 1 MB a minute, under 3% of a 1080p recording. Turn the mic off for privacy, or because you do not want your kitchen in the video, but do not expect it to save you anything. The megabytes are in the frame rate, the format and the resolution.
Does 60 fps double the size of a screen recording?
No, and this is where camera advice misleads people. Video encoders store the difference between frames, and a screen has huge regions that are identical from one frame to the next, so the extra 30 frames cost far less than the first 30. In practice 60 fps runs about 1.5 times the size of 30 fps for screen capture, against closer to 2 times for camera footage of a moving scene.
How long can I screen record before I run out of space?
Divide your free space by the per-minute figure above. With 12 GB free at 1080p/30, that is about four hours and twenty minutes of recording. There are hard limits too. Android's built-in screenrecord command cuts off at three minutes, and any phone will kill a recording the moment storage runs out, which is the usual reason a long one ends up truncated or missing entirely. The iPhone storage size calculator shows what share of the phone the rest of your library is holding.
Why doesn't this match the size my phone reports?
Because screen recording uses a variable bitrate, so the real file tracks what was on screen minute by minute rather than a fixed rate. Treat this as an estimate with a sensible margin, not a reading. The calculator also counts 1 GB as 1,000 MB, the way phone makers label storage. A Finder or Windows byte count divides by 1,024 instead and will read about 7% smaller for the same file.