Quickly and easily delete all photos from your iPhone with the information in this article, and how to never lose a photo after deletion.
iOS does not let you “select all” to delete photos and videos from your iPhone, but there is a simple solution.
You can manually select all of your photos by opening the All Photos folder, tapping Select, tapping the last photo, and then sliding your finger across the screen.
Even if you delete all of your photos from your iPhone device, you can still access them using a cloud storage app like Dropbox, Google Photos, or OneDrive.
Compared to photos and videos, pretty much everything else on your iPhone takes up little space. If your phone runs out of storage space, your collection of photos and videos may be the first to miss.
Of course, new iPhones have so much storage that you may never run out of storage. However, if you have an older model, such as iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, and iPhone 6, cleaning your photo library can sometimes be your only option.
If you’re looking for a fresh start or just want to free up space on your iPhone by doing nuclear work, you can delete all of your photos from your iPhone with relative ease.
Deleting your selfies, photos of your cat in Halloween costume, and all those screenshots you forgot to delete might be a thing of the past.
That means, of course, that your photos will go away, they will go away. So, consider whether this is the right option for you based on your needs. Without further ado, let’s see how to delete your photos from your iPhone or iPad.
When you need to reclaim a lot of space quickly, you can selectively delete some photos and videos. However, you can reclaim most of the storage space by deleting all of your pictures at once. The problem? Apple doesn’t offer you the option to select all to delete all of your photos at once. It means you have to use a little trick to do it.
Delete Photos on Your iPhone
As you’d expect, it all starts with the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad. Tap the Albums option at the bottom, then tap All Photos for a full list of all of your snapshots.
When you have viewed your photo library, press “Select” in the upper right corner, then select individual photos to delete, or slide your finger over them to highlight them as a group. Once you click the Trash icon, you will be prompted to delete photos or cancel.
Once you’ve done this, your photos will need to be deleted from the Recycle Bin. Go back to “Albums” and scroll down to find “Recently Deleted”.
Once you’ve chosen Select, you can simply delete your photos (or restore all of them) or select snapshots one at a time if you prefer. If you want to delete here, this cannot be undone. So make sure you are 100% sure!
Delete all photos from your iPhone
- Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
- Tap Albums at the bottom of the screen.
- In the “My Albums” group, tap “All Photos”. (This may be called a “camera roll” if you aren’t using iCloud to back up your photos.)
- Press “Select”.
- Lightly touch the photo below. Then without lifting your finger, drag it to the left and then at the top of the title bar at the top of the screen. Your finger should end at the top of the clock in the upper left corner. Keep your finger there while scrolling down photos is selected. This will take some time, especially if you have a lot of photos on your phone. An updated list of the selected photos appears in the centre of the title bar.
- When you have selected all of the photos, tap the trash can icon in the lower right corner.
- Confirm that you want to delete these photos by clicking “Delete NN Items” (where NN is the total number of photos you want to delete.
Permanently Delete all of your Photos on iPhone.
At this point, all of your photos have been moved to the Recently Deleted folder on your iPhone. If you don’t do anything else, iOS will remove them from your phone within 30 days. However, to delete them and reclaim space immediately, you need to empty this folder.
1. Tap Albums to redisplay the album list.
2. Scroll to the “Other Albums” section and tap “Recently Deleted”.
3. Press “Select”.
4. In the lower-left, tap Delete All.
5. Confirm that you want to delete these photos by tapping Delete NN Items (where NN is the total number of photos you want to permanently delete from your phone.
Note that you can also recover photos that you accidentally deleted from here.
Use a Mac to delete all photos from your iPhone.
- If you’ve invested in the Apple ecosystem and use a Mac, you can access your photos from a desktop or laptop. All changes will be reflected on your phone.
- If you delete them, they will disappear as long as both devices are connected to your iCloud Photo Library.
- Go to the Photos app on your Mac and click a photo. Then press Command and A at the same time to select all. Then hit the backspace key, and they will be sent to the Recently Deleted section on the left side of the app.
- As you can imagine, you have to click Recently Deleted, select the photos again, then permanently delete them all.
- Hello, all of those photos are gone, and you have freed up precious space on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and iCloud accounts. You’d better start making new memories!
Keep your photos, even if you delete them.
Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too. Even if you have to reclaim all of the space for photos and videos on your iPhone, the good news is that it’s easy to keep all of your photos in the cloud and access them on your phone almost as easily as if you are still in the photos app.
Dropbox, Google Photos and OneDrive can automatically back up all of your photos and videos online in the background, so you never have to think about it. To do this, simply install the cloud storage app of your choice and configure it to automatically save your photos for you. This has many advantages:
- You have instant access to your iPhone photos at any time on any device, including your PC, by simply logging into the appropriate cloud service in a web browser.
- You will get an automatic backup of your iPhone photos.
- To save storage space, you can delete all of your photos from your iPhone and still browse and view photos and videos using the cloud app.