How to delete all photos on your iPhone or iPad. Regardless of the storage capacity of your phone, sooner or later you will be destined to run out of space.
When you start receiving insufficient memory alerts, you have two options: stop taking pictures or make more space by deleting images you no longer want.
To free up space, you can go through the camera roll by deleting photos one at a time. But this is a process that takes a long time.
It is much easier and faster to delete all your photos at once and start over. Here’s how to delete all photos of iPhone or iPad in a few simple steps.
Important: Before starting, of course, make sure to back up all the photos you do not want to lose permanently.
You can use a cloud storage service, such as iDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, for this, but you have to be careful. When you sync files to a cloud storage device, deleting them on your iPhone or iPad will synchronize that deletion with the cloud storage unit.
So if you delete them on your device, they are also deleted in the cloud storage. For this reason, it is better to take the extra step to download those photos synchronized from the cloud storage on your computer or physical drive to ensure you have a good backup of them. Of course, you can also connect your device to your computer with a USB cable and copy it manually.
How to delete all your photos from iPhone and iPad
Start by turning on the Photo app. In the Albums tab, select the “All Photos” folder.
you’ll stream a stream of all your photos with the latest images at the bottom of the screen. In the upper right corner, tap the “Select” option.
Unfortunately, iOS11 does not have a Select All option. However, you can still select your photos massively enough.
On the Select Items page, touch and hold the last image in your camera roll. With your finger still pressed, scroll up and to the left to select other photos. Keep scrolling until all your photos are selected (the display will scroll as you do).
Selected photos show an icon with a blue check in the lower right corner. After selecting all your photos, touch the trash can icon in the lower right corner of the screen.
You will see an alert asking if you are sure you want to delete the selected photos. Tap the “Delete” option.
Apple is very good at making sure you do not accidentally delete your photos, so you need to do another step to make your changes permanent.
On the Albums tab, open the “Recently Deleted” folder (usually located at the bottom of the page).
In this folder, you’ll see all the photos you just deleted along with all the others you’ve deleted in the last 30 days. Each photo has a “#Days” label that indicates how long it will be stored in the “Recently deleted” folder before it is permanently deleted. Unless you manually restore these photos, they will automatically be permanently removed from memory when the day countdown reaches zero.
Tap “Select” in the upper right corner of the recently deleted page.
Tap “Delete all” in the lower left corner of the screen.
You will see an alert that this action can not be deleted. Tap “Delete #items” to permanently delete your photos.
How to delete photos on all devices synchronized by macOS
If you have access to a Mac, there’s an even easier way to delete your iPhone or iPad photos at once, even from multiple devices where you’ve synced them.
Open the Desktop Photo app on your Mac. If you’ve set up iCloud to sync your phone and desktop, all photos should be displayed in the app’s menu.
Press Command + A on the keyboard to select all your photos.
With the photos selected, right-click in the image display area. Click on the “Delete #items” option.
A warning message displays informing you that this will erase your photos on all your synced devices. Click on the “Delete” button.
Device reset
You can also delete all your photos on a particular device by simply resetting the device. In this way all your personal data, including photos, videos and apps, are deleted from your phone, returning it as new.