This PS5 feature eats up your storage — how to turn it off

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PS5 automatic trophy clips chew up SSD space. Here's how to stop them.

PS5
(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

The PS5’s loading times are screamingly fast, but with only 825GB of capacity and games that can take up some 50GB or more, space is limited. That's why it might be wise to switch off the console’s automatic capture of a video clip when you win a trophy. 

In a world where watching people play games and sharing clips of game footage is seemingly as popular as playing the games themselves, this feature is a slick one from Sony. However, capturing clips at a 4K resolution can gobble up a decent chunk of SSD space. 

When you consider that the PS5 SSD has 667.2GB of usable SSD space once the operating system and UI is up and running, these automatically saved clips can make an already limited amount of storage seem even smaller. 

As such, switching off the feature can see you grab back some more storage space, which could mean the difference between being able to download the latest PS5 games or being forced to purge another from your installed collection. 

How to turn off PS5 trophy videos  

If you’re lucky enough to have a PS5 — check out our where to buy PS5 guide if you’re still searching for one — then you might not know about this feature. But it’s easy to find and switch off. 

Simply navigate to the PS5 settings menu in the top right-hand side of the console’s UI and then scroll to the “Captures and Broadcast” setting menu. 

From there head down to the “Trophies” menu. Under that you’ll see a “Save Trophy Screenshots” and “Save Trophy Videos” options, both of which are toggled on by default. 

You’ll want to switch off the latter to kill the automatic capture of trophy video clips — simply hit the toggle so that it’s orientated to the left and thus in an off position. But you can also switch off the automatic screenshots feature that should go one step further to saving on precious SSD space. 

One those options are toggled, simply hit the Circle button on the DualSense controller to go back through the menus and to the home screen, or just hold the PlayStation button. It’s all very easy. 

Now this won’t solve all your storage woes, as with the large size of modern games you’re still likely to fill up your PS5’s SSD pretty quickly. But do bear in mind you can store older backwards compatible PS4 games on an external hard drive. 

And Sony will have approved internal PCIe 4.0 SSDs at some point that’ll let you boost the console’s overall SSD space. Unfortunately, until then, you'll need to be selective about what you install on the PS5’s SSD. 

Roland Moore-Colyer
Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.