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How to delete all photos from your iPhone

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Summary

To delete all photos from your iPhone, follow these steps...

  1. Open the Photos App on your iPhone.
  2. Tap Select (top-right corner of the screen)
  3. Tap photos to select them. When viewing photos by Days, you can tap "Select All" to select all photos taken on a certain day.
  4. Tap the Trash icon, then confirm the removal.
  5. To permanently delete your photos, find the Recently Deleted album in your iPhone albums, tap on Select and choose Delete All.

We recommend backing up your photos to your computer before deleting them from your iPhone. You can do this easily with TouchCopy!

How to Backup iPhone Photos

Detailed Steps

If you need to free up some space on your iPhone, or simply want to back up your photos to your computer so you can remove them from your iPhone, you're in the right place. You can also save a tonne of space on your iPhone by clearing Documents & Data.

Before deleting anything from your iPhone, we strongly recommend backing up your files, in case you delete something you didn't want to delete. If your files are backed up and you make a mistake, you can recover them easily from your computer. We'll cover backing up your photos later on in this article, but feel free to start there if you wish to back up your photos first!

Deleting Photos from your iPhone

Delete photos from your iPhone

The device in this image uses iCloud to store its photos, and if we go ahead with the deletion, photos will be deleted from iCloud library on all devices connected to this account. If you don't store your photos in iCloud, they will only be deleted from your current device.

Let's jump straight in with deleting a single photo. Open your Photos app on your iPhone, tap a photo you want to remove from the device, then tap the Trash icon. Confirm the removal, and the photo will be sent to "Recently Deleted".

If you wish to remove multiple photos at once from your iPhone, open up your Photos App again, and ensure that you are in Photos, Memories or Shared. Now tap Select from the top-right corner of the app. You'll now be able to tap multiple photos (or tap and drag your finger) to select multiple images.

Once you've made your selection, tap the Trash icon, and confirm the delete. Your photos will again be sent to "Recently Deleted".

Recently Deleted: You may notice that no space has been cleared from your iPhone yet. This is your iPhone's safety mechanism for temporarily backing up your photos in case you change your mind. When you "delete" a photo, it will be kept in Recently Deleted for 30 days. If you are sure that you want to remove the photos from your device after they are sent to Recently Deleted, you can delete them from here before the 30 days are up. Go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted, hit Select, then tap Delete All.

Now the photos are deleted permanently from your iPhone.

Delete photos from your computer

If you're interested in deleting photos from your PC or Mac, read on below...

How to delete photos from Windows PC

  1. Navigate to the folder where your photos are stored on your PC hard drive using File Explorer.
  2. Click the folder, or select the photos within the folder that you wish to delete.
  3. Hit the delete key on your keyboard, or right-click > delete.
  4. By default, deleted items are sent to the Recycle Bin.
Delete photos from your PC computer

How to delete photos from Mac or MacBook

  1. Navigate to the folder where your photos are stored on your Mac hard drive using Finder.
  2. Click the folder, or select the photos within the folder that you wish to delete.
  3. Click the delete key on your keyboard, or right-click > move to trash.
  4. By default, deleted items are sent to the Trash Can.
Delete photos from your Mac computer

To permanently delete the photos, open your Recycle Bin (PC) or Trash Can (Mac), and either empty the deleted items - removing all items in the list, or select only the items you wish to delete, and delete them.

Backing up your iPhone photos

As advised at the top of this article, we always recommend backing up your iPhone before deleting anything (we also advise backing up on a regular basis, even if you don't plan on deleting data!).

You can perform a backup of your device using iTunes, but these backups don't contain all of your iPhone data, and you can't access data from your backups without restoring them to your device.

TouchCopy allows you to back up everything from your iPhone, and save the data to your computer so that you can access your photos, messages, music etc. straight from your computer.

To back up your iPhone photos to your computer, follow these steps...

  • Download and install TouchCopy and connect your device via the USB cable.
  • In TouchCopy, click on the "Photos" tab.
  • Select the photos you'd like to copy to your computer.
  • Click "Save to PC".
Download TouchCopy Now Copy photos from your iPhone to computer

For more information on how to copy photos with TouchCopy, or general information, please see the TouchCopy user guide.

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Publisher: Wide Angle Software