How to delete all photos on your iPhone or iPad

(Image credit: Apple)

You might think you'd never demand to know how to delete all photos on your iPhone or iPad — after all, y'all've got plenty of space to play with, right?

Unfortunately, that's not always the instance. High-quality photos and 4K video footage takes up a lot of space, and your iPhone can speedily run out of storage.

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Our tips outline how to manage photos and videos to claw dorsum room on your iPhone. We'll explore the nuclear selection of deleting everything — and ensuring you have back-up copies before doing so.

And although these tips refer to iPhone, they'll piece of work on your iPad and iPod bear upon as well. So here'south how to delete all photos on your iPhone and complimentary up space for all those new pictures you'll be shooting.

How to delete all photos on your iPhone: Use iCloud Photos

How to manage and delete photos and videos to free up space on your iPhone and iPad — (Epitome credit: Apple)

Keeping photos only on your device is a recipe for disaster beyond storage bug. Lose your iPhone and your precious snaps are gone — forever.

In the Settings app, head into Photos and plough on iCloud Photos. This will upload your entire photograph library to iCloud, and sync it across your devices.

Annotation: This requires you take enough iCloud storage to house your images and videos. To upgrade your iCloud storage, tap your name in Settings and then Manage Storage under iCloud.

How to delete all photos on your iPhone: Optimize on-board storage

Uploading a photo library to iCloud tin can accept a long time and depends on your internet connectivity speed. Just once it'due south done, a useful option becomes available to help reclaim space on your iPhone.

In Settings, become to General > iPhone Storage and turn on Optimize Photos. This volition significantly reduce storage demands by saving lower-quality versions of your snaps and videos on your device, leaving higher-quality ones in iCloud.

How to delete all photos on your iPhone: Manually prune your library

Yous can alternatively opt to proceed your originals, but remove from on-device storage those items you no longer need. Video is a proficient identify to start, since videos require far more storage than photos.

In the Photos app, tap the Albums tab and select Videos to list all those you've shot. Particularly look for ones with long run-times y'all no longer intendance for and delete them.

You lot can as well search your library by subject, person, year and other criteria to find groups of photos/videos to remove. Tap See All and Select, and tap-elevate across the thumbnail grid to select multiple items. Tap the trash icon to remove them.

To bin everything, apply the same process in Library > All Photos. Deleted items will stay in the Recently Deleted album for 30 days, unless yous employ Select > Delete All to remove them immediately.

Be warned: Deleted items are gone for skilful. This is also truthful for iCloud Photos: anything you remove from your library is removed from all devices. Optimization is therefore frequently a amend bet.

How to delete all photos on your iPhone: Backup before deleting

Prior to deleting anything important, make a copy of it.

If not using iCloud Photos, connect your device to your Mac or PC using a USB cable. On Mac, your photos and videos can then exist imported into the Photos app; on PC, caput to First > Photos and then Import > From a USB device. Select items to import and country where to relieve them.

If using iCloud Photos, drag items from Photos (Mac) or File Explorer > iCloud Photos (Windows, with the iCloud app) to a back-up drive before deleting them from iCloud. You might besides choose to have a back-up of the unabridged library. (On Mac, this is found in the Pictures folder within your user binder.)

Should you only have a mobile device and want to continue a re-create of images/videos prior to deletion, share them to a cloud storage service similar Apple tree's iCloud or Dropbox. Alternatively, transfer your entire library to Google Photos as per Apple'southward tech commodity. However, be mindful Google services limit y'all to 15GB of storage earlier you lot must start paying an annual fee.