How to: Delete all photos off an iPhone
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.
-
- Image Capture.
-
- New folder.
-
- Delete photos.
-
- 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!
- You can find this application in your Applications folder. [↩]
- You’ll need to mount the iPhone again to see these options in iTunes. [↩]
July 9th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
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!
July 12th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Thanks so much for this! This is by far the easiest example I was able to google, wew.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Yeah this is a good solution. It has been such a pain managing photos on my iphone.
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
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.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
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.
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:30 am
Great EASY solution, works fast !!
Thanks
cb
September 1st, 2008 at 6:07 am
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!
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:42 am
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
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:39 am
Dhillon: Are you asking on a Windows computer? I am not sure what that procedure is. Maybe someone else can help?
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:59 am
can this be done with a pc with vista
October 7th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Thanks so much! You saved me a lot of time and energy.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Thanks! Best solution of them all
October 24th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] published a great article on how to delete all photos off of an iPhone. There’s no way to do it from the iPhone itself. However, there’s an easy [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
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.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
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?
October 30th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
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.
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
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.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
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?
November 20th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Thank you, this was a great quick way to delete my photos.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
You win the prize - excellent explanation!