How to: Delete all photos off an iPhone
by Colin Devroe on June 16th, 2008
For an entire year I’ve wanted to be able to do this easily. And I think I’ve now found the best way to do this without the possible side-effect of losing all of your photos on your iPhone.
One of the problems with the iPhone is that you can’t delete all of the photos you’ve taken within from within the iPhone’s interface. If you, like me, sync your iPhone photos with your iPhoto Library then you’ve no doubt noticed that iPhoto does let you delete all of the photos you are currently importing. But, if you’ve imported several times then iPhoto will only allow you to delete the current photos being imported.
So you’re only option has been to create a new iPhoto Library, import all of your iPhone’s photos again, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos when the task is complete. Or, you could click delete on every single photo on your iPhone one-at-a-time.
Solution: Use Image Capture.
My iPhoto Library has become very cumbersome. Opening iPhoto is a chore. Also, with the iPhone in its dock, iPhoto will compare its library with the one on the iPhone prior to allow you to import the new photos – and this takes a very long time. So, I’m going to show you how to use Image Capture, an application on your Macintosh that you may not even know you have, to create a backup of your iPhone’s photos and, subsequentally, delete them from the iPhone – in one step.
- Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
- If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
- Open Image Capture.app1
- Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
- Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
- Click “Download all”.
Here are some photos of the process.
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- Image Capture.
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- New folder.
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- Delete photos.
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- Empty camera roll.
Depending on how many photos you have on your iPhone this process may take a little while. When the downloading is complete, the iPhone’s photos will be deleted – permanently.
What if you want to save some of the photos on your iPhone? This can be done but it takes some work. After you’ve imported all of these photos into your iPhoto Library, create a new album in iPhoto called something like “iPhone camera roll”. In your iTunes preferences for this iPhone2 select this album for syncing. This way you only save the photos that you have put into this album.
I hope this helps those of you that want to delete their iPhone’s photos in a quick and easy way without worrying about losing your photos!
Update! Wiibart on Viddler uploaded a video of this in action. So I’m sharing it here.
thank you so much for this info, though I was going to be stuck with a load of junk pics that had synced themselves onto my iphone!
Thanks so much for this! This is by far the easiest example I was able to google, wew.
Yeah this is a good solution. It has been such a pain managing photos on my iphone.
Thanks for the info. Now all I need is a similar process to delete all the 600 contacts I accidentally synched with my gmail account and cant get rid of unless I delete them one by one. I find it funny they designed the iphone this way.
Peter Kure: Just adjust your Address book on your computer and have iTunes overwrite the information. You can do this in iTunes under the “Info” tab for your iPhone.
Great EASY solution, works fast !!
Thanks
cb
Thanks! I’d been deleting photos individually and I appreciate this quick and easy tip to get rid of all the photos at once. I followed your instructions and it worked like a charm!
hi
i really apprecitae and thank you.
but this doesnot solve my problem . idont have macintosh .
how can i delete aal my pics in iphone. every time i sync it with my laptop, the photos in photo library get copied to iphone. please help
Dhillon: Are you asking on a Windows computer? I am not sure what that procedure is. Maybe someone else can help?
can this be done with a pc with vista
Thanks so much! You saved me a lot of time and energy.
Thanks! Best solution of them all
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It is AMAZING that there even needs to be posted solution for this. I love this phone but Apple’s insistence on doing everything THEIR WAY is unbelievable. The simplest, cheapest, most rubbish phones / digital cameras out there can be accessed by usb and photos can be removed/deleted like any other file. Why do they have to be SO DIFFICULT! ARgh! Watch out Apple, you’re heading to be the next Microsoft.
Colin, your method sounds great… but when I went to use it Image Capture said I didn’t have any photos to download.
The problem is that I’ve already managed to delete the camera roll when I downloaded it to my Mac. However, when I synced my iPhone it copied all the photos in iPhoto over to my iPhone into two different directories which cannot be deleted even one photo at a time. There’s no icon to delete when I open individual photos in these directories.
Help?
Celeste: It sounds like you have iTunes setup to sync your photos to your phone. Simply open iTunes, go to the Photos tab (when your iPhone is connected) and only select the albums that you want to have up-to-date upon sync.
Delete in all Camera Roll photos in Windows
When you plug an iphone into a Windows PC, a IPhone drive is created for which the only contents are the iphone camera photo roll – you can copy and paste from here and also delete all photos.
it sounds like you guys just need to adjust your line of thinking. an easier way to do it is to think if your camera roll as an inbox that you want to constantly keep empty. import the photos into iphoto every time and delete them from the camera. if you want them to sync back to the camera, just create a smart album within iphoto. make one condition, “camera model is apple iphone”. this will create a new smart album with all of the photos that you’ve taken with your iphone. now adjust your sync settings to keep thyis folder synced with your iphone. now, every time you import new photos, it will delete them form your iphone, and synced back via the smart album. this keeps your camera roll empty, but you still have your new photos. you can delete the photo(s) that you don’t want from your iphoto library, and they will be removed from your phone. does that suit your needs?
Thank you, this was a great quick way to delete my photos.
You win the prize – excellent explanation!
Thanks Steve Lucky,
Your solutions sounds like what Apple intended. Shame they didn’t set this up by default!
Best, M.
Thanks a lot! You helped med save about 400 mb!
With all the latest technology I find it totally bizarre that you have to go through this whole process – delete, recycle bin or whatever – it should be the touch of a button – we are in the 21st century afterall.
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I found a very easy way to get rid of all the pictures if you want em all off. Just go to your photos tab (when Iphone is connected) and make sure it is syncd, but make sure the selected folders button is clicked. and make sure you have no folders selected. then apply it. Then when you go to use it there shouldn’t be any photos.
Ok, no one has been able to answer how to delete photos from other photo albums besides the camera roll on a PC. The only pics available through explorer are the ones in the camera roll. The other pics I have downloaded through emails are not available to be deleted either in the phone, through ITunes or through the folders.
cheers Colin, very helpful posting – nice and simple solution to a weirdly tedious problem
Image Capture has a “Delete” button in the toolbar, so you don’t even have to download the pictures. Just select-all (cmd-a) and press Delete.
Thanks for the tip to use Image Capture!
@Graham Perks: When I use that function my iPhone just restarts and no pictures are deleted. Have to go, one by one.
Is it really supposed to be this hard?
the issue with not being able to prevent unwanted photos from being synced is easy.
Create a new folder on your desktop titled “iphone sync” and using your PC dump only the photos that you want on your iPhone into this folder. When you sync – use that folder and that’s it!
If you want to get rid of a photo on your iphone simply take it out of the folder you created and re-sync.
this is the best way I know how.
Thanx! It works well. Better than pressing the trash icon in camera roll a few hundred times.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
THANKS A LOT!!!!! I use LR mainly and it was bothering me the use of iPhoto to erase content…
Wow, thanks. Been wanting to do this forever (a few hundred pics? That’s nothin’…) Worked like a charm.
Thanks. That was useful.
I just did a google search for this problem and your post came up first.
I love that it was your advice I am following to solove this problem!
Yeah.
That is awesome.
Also, after your phone is connected you can go to:
My Pictures on your computer
Click “get pictures from camera or scanner”
Then Click “Advanced Users Only”
Finally Click “Delete All Pictures on Camera”
Thi should only take a few secs to a minute depending on the number of pics you have.
An easier way to do this with Image Capture is just to click on “Download Some” then select all of the pictures and choose “Delete” (”Delete All” doesn’t seem to work) from the “Edit” menu.
GREAT !!! Simple finally got my memory back !!
Great stuff mate, worked like a charm, this had baffled me for ages, a simple and effective solution, thanks for taking the time to post this, much appreciated.
Thank you so much! Simple and works nice.
I can’t even delete pics one by one, which is what I’d like to do. the ‘camera’ roll (photos taken using iphone) does have a trash can icon, but the new folders (imported from iphotos) does not, so i appear to be stuck with them, unless i take the syncing option?
Can anyone tell me how to delete individual pics?
thanks
Hi there…did u get an answer re: inability to delete one by one photos when u dont see the “trashcan”icon on photos that were uploaded? I’m having the same prob and the answers mainly pertain to using a mac….I dont have a mac..I have Windows Vista, but no one seems to know how to do it via Vista?
Any help u can give me, using windows would be most helpful.
Thx….
This worked perfectly. Thanks for posting the clear instructions for this solution.
Thanks so much! Worked like a charm – you’re the best!
thanks bud, much appreciated
thanks SO much, I have been struggling with this through two iPhones.
very generous of you to figure this out.
Thanks for this — very hand indeed.
Like many others I am amazed and hugely disappointed with Apple in that they appear to be getting more and more stupid and Microsoft-like: overlooking such an obvious basic requirement, forcing us to do things in a dumbed-down stepwise fashion and utterly failing to think from the users’ point of view. Similar to the way Spotlight will only sort by kind, size and date last opened, and won’t allow columns for “date created” and “date last modified”.
To clear things up for those who are trying to get rid of the separate photo albums in their IPhones….In windows the Iphone creates a folder in your Picture file called I-Pod Photo Cache. You have to delete this file before resyncing your photos to your I-phone or else your I-Phone will create a duplicate folder of the same pictures in your Photos called I-phone photo Library as well as the folder in your windows Picture folder where you have put the photos you want on your I-Phone. DOn’t forget to Delete that I-Phone Photo Cache file or you will have the same pictures in two separate files
Great tip, thanks for sharing!
Corné.
Thank you for your post. IT HELPED A LOT! I did what you said.. but by mistake i changed my import settings.. I have windows vista.. and now whenever i plug in the usb cable to my computer it downloads the pictures and deletes them from the iphone (thats precisely what i wanted) BUT i changed the path of the iphone photo folder.. now i dont know how to change the settings back?? any help??
I’ve checked my programs folder in XP and do not have Open Image Capture app. Where do i get. Can’t seem to Google for it.
Thank you so much for sharing this information! It was very helpful!
Thanks! Your directions worked perfectly!