How to Delete All Photos From iPhone? Learning how to delete all photos from an iPhone is not difficult, but it is a useful skill. Perhaps your iPad or iPhone is filled with photos. Perhaps you have already backed them up on iCloud, iDrive, Google Photos, or another cloud storage service.
We have put together a step-by-step guide to help you remove all the photos from your mobile Apple device, so you don’t have to fumble aimlessly through random iOS settings.
Once you delete your photos, they are gone for good, so make sure you back them up somewhere else first. Before deleting your photos, take that into consideration.
How to delete all photos from iPhone
As of this writing, Apple no longer allows you to delete ‘All Photos’ automatically. There is, however, a relatively simple way to select all of them and erase them in a process that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
- Open the Photos app
- In the Library tab, navigate to All Photos in the navbar at the bottom of the screen.
- Tap Select in the top right.
- From the bottom-right photo, quickly slide your finger left to the bottom-left photo, then straight up to the top of the screen. Checkmarks will appear next to each photo, and you will slowly select each one. Don’t hold your finger down too long or swipe straight upwards; this will cause you to move the photo instead of choosing it.
- Use a finger from your other hand to swipe downward repeatedly to speed things up. This will let you choose from thousands of photos in a matter of seconds.
- Once you have selected your entire library, tap the trash can icon in the bottom right, then tap ‘Delete X photos’.
- Go to the Albums tab, then scroll down to Utilities to find Recently Deleted photos. Hit Select and scroll up to highlight every photo. Tap Delete in the bottom-left corner, then tap ‘Delete X Photos’ to permanently remove them.
Similarly, you can delete all photos from your iPad by following the same steps mentioned above.
If you choose to delete photos from Recently Deleted, this action cannot be reversed. As a result, your photos will sit in that folder for 30 days, giving you time to change your mind if you have regrets.
Additionally, if you back up your photos to iCloud, they’ll disappear from your cloud storage as soon as they’re deleted from your phone. In theory, you can get around this by disabling iCloud photo storage before deleting the photos, but if you reactivate it, those photos will immediately disappear.
How to delete all iPhone photos of a particular person, file type, or location
It’s pretty drastic to delete all of your iPhone photos. Maybe you want to delete some old photos you don’t need anymore, but save others. If that’s the case, there are some easy methods for removing photos by specific categories.
Let’s start with that breakup scenario. Apple’s AI does a decent job of recognizing repeated faces in your photos. So, you can easily delete all Apple Photos that include the one person you’d rather forget.
You can view headshots of your most frequently photographed subjects by selecting the Search tab, or by selecting the People & Places section of the Albums tab. Tap ‘See All’ next to the X Photos section after choosing the person you are cutting out of your life. Then, using the same finger-swiping method, you can select and toss them all.
If a particular city has become toxic to you, you can do the same thing with specific places, assuming that your photos are geotagged; just hit Search, tap one of the auto-generated Places, then choose ‘See All’ to find, select, and delete everything.
Finally, you can delete by category. You can mass-delete all of your old screenshots, previously hidden photos, unflattering selfies, or other categories by scrolling to the bottom of the Albums tab.
