The PS5 doesn’t have a lot of space, so you might not want it recording videos for all your trophies. Here’s how you turn that off.
One of the features that’s not openly advertised, but happens automatically, is how your PS5 treats the collection of trophies. As per usual, you’ll get a notification on screen every time you earn any trophy. That’s pretty standard for all PlayStation consoles in the modern age, so no surprises there.
However, what's a little less ideal is the fact that the console is set to automatically record the last 15 seconds of gameplay -- along with a screenshot -- every single time. But even if Sony doesn't openly tell you about this before quietly eating up precious space on your NVMe drive, you can turn it off pretty easily.
To find the option, you'll want to head to Settings, then Captures and Broadcasts. From there you'll have three options: Captures, Broadcasts and Trophies.
Scroll down to Trophies and you'll see these three options on the right hand side:
If you're having troubles reading those buttons, just note that a filled in white circle means the button's enabled. Scroll down to Save Trophy Videos and hit the X button. The circle should then move to the left, and the third option in the menu will disappear entirely.
This doesn't seem like it'll be much, but it can really add up depending on the game. A 4K video of a Sonic Mania trophy was under a 1MB, which isn't bad! But a trophy video for Spider-Man: Miles Morales at 1080p clocked in at 34MB, as did trophy videos for games like Monster Hunter: World.
If you're not careful, you could easily end up with a ton of trophy videos particularly if you're replaying older games on the PS5 that you never touched. And if you're not the only person using a console, then things can get out of hand real quickly.
So do yourself a favour, and disable the automatic recording off the bat. If you want to save the moment when you got a trophy, the Create button will let you save the most recent snippet of gameplay -- and you can customise whether you want that to be 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes or a full hour.
Plenty of time to catch that perfect moment, but this way you're the one deciding when to eat up that precious hard drive space.
Nah, man! This is one of those little quality of life upgrades that I’m actually super keen for. Not that I’ll be owning a PS5 anytime soon… but when I do, I want auto video evidence of my meagre accomplishments. :p
anyone know if it’s possible to store this data on external USB storage?
Trophy data? Or the screenshots/videos of the trophies that get recorded.
You can backup PS4 vids to USB so you’d have to imagine they’d let you do it with PS5.
Great tip, Alex. Cheers.
I’ll be happy if I can push all video data to an external HD.
Anyone know if this can be done?
I guess the missing feature for me here is the “automatically upload to $video_site”. You could just delete them all when they’re done.
I do this periodically with my PS4 vids but it’s cumbersome and time consuming.