How to Delete All Photos from Your iPhone (or Just a Lot of Them)

By Matthieu Poulain · Updated September 26, 2026 · 7 min read

To delete all photos from your iPhone, open Photos, tap Select, then drag your finger across the thumbnails and down the screen to select everything, and tap the trash icon. Before you do, check whether iCloud Photos is on: if it is, the photos are also deleted from iCloud and your other devices.

Before you delete anything: the iCloud check

This one setting decides whether "delete all photos from my iPhone" means "from this phone" or "from everywhere".

1. Open Settings and tap your name at the top.
2. Tap iCloud, then Photos.
3. Look at the iCloud Photos switch (called "Sync this iPhone" in recent iOS versions).

• On: your library is synced. Deleting on the iPhone deletes on iCloud.com, your iPad and your Mac too.
• Off: deleting only affects the iPhone. Other copies (on a computer, a drive, another cloud service) are untouched.

If your goal is to clear the phone but keep your photos online, don't just select all and delete. Read our guide on deleting photos from iPhone but not iCloud first.

Method 1: Delete all photos on iPhone with the drag-to-select trick

The Photos app has no "Select All" button in the main library. This gesture does the same job.

1. Open Photos and go to your full library (the grid of all photos).
2. Scroll to the very bottom, where your most recent photos are.
3. Tap Select.
4. Place your finger on the last photo, drag sideways across the row, then keep dragging up toward the top of the screen without lifting your finger.
5. iOS scrolls automatically and selects everything you pass over. Keep holding until you reach the oldest photos.
6. Tap the trash icon and confirm.

On a library of several thousand photos, this takes a minute or two of holding. Pinching out to show smaller thumbnails first makes it faster.

Method 2: Delete everything from a Mac (fastest for huge libraries)

If you have a Mac and use iCloud Photos, this is the quickest way to clear tens of thousands of photos.

1. Open the Photos app on your Mac, signed in with the same Apple Account.
2. Click Library in the sidebar.
3. Press Command-A to select every item in the view.
4. Press Delete and confirm.

The deletion syncs to your iPhone through iCloud Photos. It can take a while for a large library to finish syncing, so keep both devices online.

If iCloud Photos is off, you can instead connect the iPhone by cable and use the Mac's import window, which offers to delete items from the iPhone after importing them.

Method 3: Delete in bulk by album or type

Often you don't want to delete everything, just a lot. The Media Types section of the Photos app groups things like Videos, Screenshots, Selfies and Live Photos. Open one, tap Select and use the same drag gesture.

Good candidates for a mass delete:

• Screenshots: usually hundreds, almost all disposable.
• Videos: few in number but the biggest files by far.
• Old albums from messaging apps: memes and forwarded images saved automatically.

Method 4: Mass delete without deleting what matters

Deleting everything is rarely what people really want. Usually it's "get rid of the 80% of junk and keep the good ones". Selecting everything and deleting is fast; picking through thousands of thumbnails is not.

That's the job PhotoTri was built for. It shows your photos one at a time: swipe left to delete, swipe right to keep. You can start from a month, an album or a category (Screenshots, Selfies, Bursts, Large videos over 100 MB, and more), and sort by heaviest to deal with the biggest files first. If you'd rather tap, there's a Grid mode where you select several and move them to trash at once.

Everything you swipe away lands in PhotoTri's own trash, where you can restore one or all before anything is sent to iOS Recently Deleted. There's an Undo button for the last action, too.

Finish the job: empty Recently Deleted

Whichever method you use, deleted photos move to Recently Deleted and stay there for 30 days. Your storage won't go down until they leave.

1. In Photos, go to Utilities > Recently Deleted.
2. Unlock with Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.
3. Tap Select, then Delete All, and confirm.

This step is permanent on the iPhone. See our guide on permanently deleting photos for what happens next and when recovery is still possible.

Common mistakes when deleting all photos

• Forgetting iCloud is on. The most common cause of "all my photos disappeared from my iPad too".
• Trusting an untested backup. Open a few photos and play a few videos from the copy before deleting the originals.
• Not emptying Recently Deleted. Storage looks unchanged, and people assume the deletion didn't work.
• Deleting shared album content. Shared albums are managed separately from your library; deleting from your library doesn't always remove what you've shared.

If the real goal is space rather than a clean slate, our guide to freeing up space on iPhone lists other quick wins beyond photos.