i’ve yet to upgrade my playstation 5‘s storage since receiving one as part of my previous job at kotaku. as such, every major game forces me to conduct an introspective negotiation about what to keep on the 825 gb ssd with which the console launched in 2020 (a model update in 2023 improved this to 1 tb). the whole process would be a little easier, however, if my storage wasn’t also full of gameplay and cutscene clips that my broken brain won’t just let me delete en masse.

as of right now, 341 gb of my ps5 storage is taken up by games. this is normal; the ps5 is a video game console, after all, and games are fucking huge these days. but the next biggest category is the media gallery, in which i’ve amassed thousands of screenshots and videos to the tune of 211 gb. while i used to capture stuff constantly for work just in case a coworker or i needed unique media for a blog, my compulsive share button-pressing really exploded with final fantasy 7 rebirth. apart from not wanting to forget all the fun and touching moments i experienced with my fake buddies, the ps5 and its games do a couple of annoying things that make scrubbing video captures for images far less annoying than simply taking screenshots.

like, why can’t the ps5 automatically remove its own notifications from screenshots to avoid obscuring what you’re trying to capture? on steam, for example, i can spam the screenshot button to grab dozens of images in just a few seconds and none of them will include the little window that pops up in the bottom-right corner letting you know the process was successful. the ps5 uses a small icon in the top-right corner to notify users of the same thing, but if this symbol is still visible during subsequent share button presses, it’ll show up in screenshots. i hate it! ps5 screenshots are fortunately pretty high-res, meaning you can often crop out the notification, but sometimes doing so and maintaining a decent image is impossible.

video games have also started to do this (likely publisher-mandated) thing where they apply huge watermarks to anything you capture while playing. final fantasy 7 rebirth does this, as does like a dragon: infinite wealth. fortunately, the former only does so with screenshots, not videos. so if you want to save pictures of, say, aerith being cute or red xiii acting like a human without a bunch of stupid text at the bottom highlighting the obvious reality that square enix owns the final fantasy copyright, the best thing to do is save the last few minutes of gameplay and grab images from there, even if the resolution is worse.

the problem? now that i have all these clips waiting for me, i can’t muster the motivation to go through and capture the screenshots i want. but i also can’t bring myself to trash them. i deleted elden ring rather than prune my media gallery, for crying out loud. what is wrong with me? a lot, apparently. thanks for letting me vent.