Mrs Wells has some 30000 photos on her phone to the point it can barely function.
I said you have to delete them. So I downloaded the latest batch, a mere 15000 pics, many duplicates and 300 videos , many 2-3 seconds long to add to the other gazillion on file.
So onto deleting the pics from her iphone 14.
I know about select and sliding across to bulk delete. But I’m talking many thousands of the bastards.
I can’t find a delete all option anywhere.
Anyone know a hack.
ATM – how to delete all your photos of an iphone in one fell swoop
by 35 Comments
Excellent question. I hope you get some useful answers, as I’m in the same boat.
Do you have a Mac or MacBook you can hook the phone up to?
Yes
Open the library in Photos, hit Apple-A* and you’ll select 30,000 photos. Now hit delete.
* Or Windows-A, or whatever the hell it is.
Yeah, pretty much that, or download a third party client to find the photo files on your phone and delete them. This kinda thing: https://beebom.com/best-file-managers-iphone/
Thanks @DrJ. That does all sound extremely useful.
I’ll get one of my more technically competent pals to explain it all to me properly but a quick skim suggests that one of these could be an invaluable addition to our modern lifestyle.
Is this going to delete them from the phone or the Macbook ?
Depends on whether your photo library is synched across your various iDevices.
I am ignorant. How would I know this? I know that to transfer the photos to a Macbook I have to open Photos on Macbook and it asks if I want to import. If I delete from either location the photo remains on the other location.
This is why I don’t use an iPhone (I have in the past), delete a photo or a music file in one place and it can disappear everywhere if you haven’t ticked (or unticked) the right box or something.
Both Windows and Android can be just as bad, because by default they sync everything to their proprietory Cloud services and will bug you from time to time to sync everything from there to all of your devices.
I don’t know what Apple do in this respect, not having any Apple devices, but if you turn off syncing of your pics etc. to Microsoft’s One Drive cloud storage, Windows Update has a tendency to turn it back on again sometimes. And reverse other non-default settings that you’ve made, too.
AFAIK Android doesn’t mess with your settings during updates.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40868288.html
Are you suggesting the phone be tossed off a fishing trawler to remove the photos?
Despite not knowing who Davy Jones or how he came to own
a locker, it almost worked for Ms Vardy…
Throw iPhone into toilet and press Flush. Wonder why you were sucked into the Apple Universe before buying an Android phone ( which is actually very easy to work) supplied by a very friendly non-intrusive Chinese manufacturer with no interest whatsoever in your personal life.
This response is the sort of thing I expect KFD was anticipating above.
I haven’t used an Apple device since I once used an ‘Internet Cafe’ and recoiled in horror at the single mouse button. I’m pretty au-fait with Windows devices. My phone runs on Android. I find Android an abomination, quite frankly. The only way I can get any sense of being in control of the thing is to plug it into a PC using a USB cable.
Android phones can be “seen” by a Mac (iMac in my case) with MacDroid, which lets you edit the content of your entry level Samsung (with Blur-O-Vision©) on your desktop ‘puter. Fablious.
I also recoiled in horror at the single mouse button. Meece are Apple’s Achilles heel. Instead of flouncing, though, I bought a superb Logitech mouse with any number of buttons and carried merrily on.
Do you want to free up space on the phone or actually delete the photos.
If it’s the first, then Settings, Photos, Select iCloud Photos and select Optimise iPhone Storage. Keeps your photos in the cloud and download tiny versions to your phone. If you select a photo on your phone, it will download the original. The originals are also backed up in case you lose your phone.
If it’s the second, get on your Mac, open Photos and select the ones you want to delete and select delete. It will take a bit of time and effort but you have got a lot of photos.
In the first instance I want to free up space as the phone cant do updates etc.This is Mrs Wells’ phone – not mine.
Of these 30000 photos I reckon 20000 are of the grandkids, often multiple shots of the same thing.
I have already backed them up to the Macbook. So I just want to delete them all off her phone without them being erased from the Macbook. In due course I will embark on the tedious process of culling from the Macbook ,which can be done more efficiently.
As to people pointing out the merits of Android or the lack of merit in Apple products, that may well be the case but we’re not chucking the stuff out so it is not really helpful to this matter.
I believe (but not 100% certain) that once they are in your photos library on your MacBook, they will not be deleted from there if you delete on the phone.
However, I have all photo syncing to cloud etc turned off (mainly as we share the. iCloud account as a family and it would soon fill up with the kids rubbish from their phones),
I usually back up my phone to the MacBook from time to time – there is an option when you import to delete from phones when you have imported (which further suggests deleting on phone will not impact the MacBook). What I then usually do is drag the newly imported photos to a folder on my backup drive (which gives me a backup and allows me to trim down the photo library on my Mac).
Remember also that on Apple devices, any deleted photos will be kept for 30 days in the deleted photos folder, so you could safely try deleting a few of the photos on your phone and check they are still there in the Mac.
Hope, Junior, that you didn’t think my very funny joke was anything else but a very funny and very unhelpful joke? I tried to do the same thing re deleting photos on my wife’s iPhone a few years ago. After many fruitless attempts (she wanted to keep everything) we bought a reconditioned iPhone with 256gb memory. She now has 90000 photos and still nowhere near maxing out.
@Junior-Wells
If don’t already do so, might be a good idea to get yourself an external hard disk and/or use Time Machine
Apologies if the following is telling you stuff you already know…
If you don’t yet subscribe to iCloud services I would suggest that you have a look. It starts at £1 per month in the UK (not sure about Oz – I could look it up but I am inherently lazy) for 50gb of storage. Its £3 per month for 200gb. The later is ample for a family of people that photograph lots and delete little. The former may well be enough. I look at £3 as pretty much the price of a small coffee in a coffee shop. And iCloud gives me so much more than a queue and a short term caffeine hit with a potential scolding as the lid wasn’t put on properly.
There are a whole bunch of decent things iCloud does but, in the main, it will seamlessly back up your photos and allow the iPhone to have small versions of the photos on. It also gives you document storage so you also have all the important documents on all your apple devices backed up and available anywhere. And it is much more secure than carrying paper copies of personal docs when travelling for example..
You could buy an external HD for less but you would have to keep doing the back ups. And hope it doesn’t get broken/stolen/lost etc. And you lose the cross device functionality.
When you want to have a review of the photos, you use the MacBook and sit comfortably for as long as you can bear and delete the stuff you don’t want.
It may well be the best thing about owning Apple devices.
I guess so , it’s just another payment to the man is the source of my resistance. Plus there’s sonething not right about having limitless storage for shit photos. Mrs Wells would be up to 100 k f minor variations on the same grandkid shot in no time.
I managed to delete all off the camera file by sliding across then holding my finger on the screen and it just scrolled down.
I didnt use a file manager app as under confident and ,there wasn’t enough space to download it. Circular problem.
But it still says storage is full and it is in photos on her phone. I dont know how to delete from photo storage on the phone.
It’s probably because it continues to store deleted photos for 30 days after deletion.
Go to the “recently deleted” photo on your photos app (under Albums and then scroll down) and delete the photos there.
Yep. Thanks. So have to do it twice 🙄
No matter how much I dislike Apple, the deleting twice makes sense. “Oh god, why did I do that?”…
Android , as ever, keeps it simple – “You’ve had a couple tonight, are you really sure? Yeah? Fine, let’s do it”
Yes, there is that.
You’re already heavily invested in the man by the sound of things. I pay $4.49 a month for 200GB (£2.34 of our Great British Pounds, cheaper than UK oddly enough), have all my photos backed up (a mere 6650, admittedly) and have 165GB left.
If you have Amazon Prime you get unlimited storage for your photos. That’s what Mrs W uses but still keeps them all on her iPhone as well. Everything also on an external hard drive. No way she’s losing her photos, no sirree.
Just tried to back up Mrs Wells’ laptop , now the repository of all her photos, apart from whatever taken today 🙄
Wont recognise the La Cie which, of course, works fine on mine.
Seems like I fought the man but he’s gonna win.
Does anyone actually ever look at their old photos cache on anything? I thought the point was to take multiple pictures and forget them, which is so much easier than having old shoe boxes somewhere, full of prints, which, if you are seeking that one fine shot of someone, will be impossible to find. Far better to scroll for hours, ahead of finding one similar, by which time the person asking has lost interest or gone away.
Not a million miles away from me , a woman as we speak is grouping each day’s photos into folders.
Ask her “When did we go to Devon?” or “Where was that lovely fountain in Sicily?” and two seconds later there it is. Makes you lot what file your cds or list your concerts look exactly what you are, amateurs.