How to Bulk Remove Many Photos on iPhone Quickly with a Date Trick
If you need to remove a bunch of pictures from your iPhone, the iOS Photos app now includes a handy group selection tool that allows for bulk modification of many images without having to resort to tapping and marking a ton of pics or any of the other deletion tricks. Instead, mass deleting many multiples of photos from the iPhone is now just a matter of selecting groups of images by collections, which are automatically arranged into dates by iOS, and this allows for simple removal of up to thousands of photos at once.
Remember that deleting pictures from the iPhone is permanent, so you’ll want to be sure you either have backed them up first, transferred them to a computer, uploaded them to a service online, or just genuinely don’t want the photos. Once you’ve deleted them, there’s no going back, at least without restoring from a complete backup made of the device.
How to Batch Remove Multiple Photos from the iPhone
The date selection trick is by far the simplest method of removing may photos at once. It’s not particularly obvious, but it is easy to use:
- Open the “Photos” app on the iPhone
- Choose the “Photos” tab on the bottom (the default view usually opens to Albums, the bulk delete function is limited to the Photos Collections view)
- Locate the date(s) in the Collections view you want to bulk delete, then tap the “Select” button in the upper right corner
- Tap on “Select” alongside each date to select all images for and to set for removal from the iPhone
- Tap the Trash icon in the lower right corner
- Confirm the removal of the photos by tapping “Delete (##) Photos” to instantly bulk delete all photos that were selected (note the number shown of photos that have been selected at the deletion confirmation screen, if that number does not look right do not tap to confirm the removal, instead tap on ‘Cancel’ and re-select the pictures to delete)
This will instantly remove every photo that has been selected, regardless of the total count of photos. Again, this only deletes photos that have been selected. Once you have tapped on ‘Select’ you can also tap on individual pictures to unselect them, which would cause them to be excluded from the deletion process.
Removing Every Single Photo from the iPhone
If you want to remove every single photo from the iPhone, you can use this trick. Just repeat the process as outlined above, but staying at the initial selection screen. Then simply go through and tap on the ‘Select’ button next to every date group as you scroll through the Photos Collections view. Once every date has been selected, tapping the Trash icon then “Delete” will remove every single picture from the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
This batch select trick is new to modern versions of iOS, prior versions of the Photos app required users to select each picture to delete manually from the iPhone (which continues to work in iOS 8, it’s just slower than this method), deleting the camera roll from the Settings app (a feature which no longer exists in modern versions of iOS at all), or even hooking the iPhone up to a computer and then deleting them all from there with the assistance of a camera utility app in OS X or Windows – that method still works too but it’s hardly convenient if you wanted to handle a bunch of pics right on the device without using a computer to intervene with your photos collection.
As you may have guessed, this quick select-by-date trick is applicable to all iOS devices, so it’s not just the iPhone that can batch delete images this way, the iPad and iPod touch can as well, the only requirement is running a modern enough version of iOS to have the Collections view, which is in both iOS 7 and iOS 8.
Unfortunately I have deleted all my photos how to recover the photos.
I wish they would have carried the “Select” option to the highest level of date-periods, ie, so you could select an entire year of photos.
That, or at the top after you click Select, an option to select all would appear in addition to selecting each period of time.
Selecting each period of time is rather bulky.
Hey Paul,
Thanks for sharing your great useful tip, I have now over
7000 Photos and 342 Videos after deleting some of them, so I have more space In iPhone and iPad&PC !
Wishing you a fantastic week and good Day!
Friendly greetings from 🇩🇲
I am so very SICK of Apple becoming more and more like Micro(brain)soft!
It USED to be with an Apple youy could open an app and just use common sense to figure it out.
How about a simple selecting photos you don’t want and then having a simple delete option in a menu?
C’mon Apple – either bring back Steve Jobs from the dead or else quit trying to emulate the brain dead programmers at Micro(brain)soft who think that people enjoy memorizing multiple steps for every action that SHOULD be so VERY SIMPLE to do.
I woukld be a millionaire if I could charge Micro)brain)soft for the inumerable amounts of time I have had to waste trying to figure out what SHOULD be siumple tasks ad now Apple is messing with us the same way!
Again:
multiple select by dragging, then delete option in menu.
Do this in Photos and/or Image Capture.
How hard can it be? Certainly a lot less hard than dreaming up new ways top complicate and program the code for the way it presently is!
This is the only method worked for me. Thanks a lot sir
The only method worked for me! Bunch of thanx.
Nice post but I think you should include a new feature. In iOS 9 you can bulk select photos by performing a swipe, then delete it all with ease. Also, there is a tip that takes advantage of this new feature. With the tip, you can swipe to select photos in the Photos app and then tap the status bar to go all the way to the top of albums. All your photos will be selected.
Man, you saved my day! Thanks a bunch!
Nah, still a no-go. If you have multiple gigabytes of thousands upon thousands of photos, this method would still be too time consuming. Still looking for a better solution, even if it’s only with a third party app.
Chris, this is the fastest way to bulk delete photos from an iPhone on the iPhone itself. Apple does not offer another option in iOS.
There is no other option for bulk removal of pictures on the iPhone with modern versions of iOS. The only other option would be to connect the iPhone to a Mac or Windows PC and delete them as discussed here: https://osxdaily.com/2012/08/02/delete-all-photos-from-iphone/
Didn’t work for me either – trash can never became hot.
Thank you!! Easy instructions and saved me lots of time!’
Lifesaver! I had over 8000 photos, got rid of them in 5-10 mins this way. Thanks!
Followed directions exactly but trashcan never became “hot” only the “add to” option was available.
I had the same results. The trash can never became “hot”.
Same thing with me. Can’t click on trashcan. Help!
Wow. Almost like surgery.