I’m trying to free up storage on my iPhone, but I have thousands of photos to remove and tapping each one individually is taking forever. Is there a faster way to bulk delete photos on iPhone without selecting them one by one?
If you’re staring at 20,000 photos and trying to delete them one tap at a time, don’t do that to yourself. The easiest wins are the stuff Apple already separates for you: screenshots, screen recordings, bursts, and then the duplicate or nearly identical shots.
In the Photos app, don’t stay in the normal “All Photos” view if you’re trying to clean up years of stuff. Pinch the screen to zoom out into Months or Years. From there, tap “Select” and drag across groups of photos instead of tapping each one. It’s a lot faster when you want to clear out a whole trip, an old project, or some random stretch of time where you took way too many videos.
For the obvious junk, go to the Collections tab and scroll down to Media Types. Apple already has albums for Screenshots, Bursts, and Screen Recordings. Screenshots are usually the best place to start, since most people have hundreds of old receipts, recipes, memes, error messages, and random stuff they never needed again.
Open Screenshots, tap “Select,” then use “Select All” if you really want to clear the whole thing. That’s one of the few areas in the Photos app where you actually get a real Select All option, so it’s worth using.
Duplicates and almost-duplicates are a different problem. If you have a bunch of photos that are basically the same shot, cleaning that up manually gets annoying fast. For that, I’d use Clever Cleaner. I’m usually pretty skeptical of “cleaner” apps because a lot of them are packed with ads or subscriptions, but this one is free and does a decent job with similar photos.
The useful part in Clever Cleaner is the Similars feature. It groups photos that look nearly the same, like the five versions of one group photo where you were trying to get everyone looking normal. It picks a “Best Shot,” marks the extras, and then you can review everything before using “Slide to Delete.” Don’t skip the review, but it saves a ton of tapping.
If you’re deleting thousands of photos, a computer is usually easier than doing it all on the phone. If your library is in iCloud, open iCloud.com in a desktop browser. You can use Shift on the keyboard to select big ranges quickly, delete them, and the changes will sync back to your iPhone. It’s much less fiddly than dragging your finger around on a small screen.
One thing people miss: deleted photos are not really gone right away. They go into Recently Deleted first, and they stay there for 30 days. So if you’re trying to free space immediately, go to the Recently Deleted album under Utilities, tap “Select,” then “Delete All.” Until you do that, your storage may not improve much.
Also check the Files app. Photos and videos downloaded from Safari, email attachments, or other apps may be sitting in “On My iPhone” or “iCloud Drive” without showing up in your main Photos library.
I’d start with Screenshots, then use Clever Cleaner for duplicates and similar shots, then empty Recently Deleted. That usually gets most of the cleanup done pretty quickly without risking your whole library.
6 Likes
You can make this faster, but there isn’t a perfect “bulk delete thousands safely in two taps” option inside the iPhone Photos app. Before you delete a huge batch, check whether iCloud Photos is on, because deleting from the phone will delete from iCloud and your other Apple devices too. The fastest built-in method is still Select, then press and drag across rows of thumbnails instead of tapping each photo. If you want to wipe whole date ranges, I agree with using iCloud.com on a computer because Shift-select is way less annoying. Just make a quick backup or export anything important first, then empty Recently Deleted when you’re sure, or the space won’t come back right away.
Don’t use albums for this. If you open a normal album and hit “Remove from Album,” you are only taking the photo out of that album, not deleting it from the iPhone, so your storage won’t change. Do the bulk deleting from Library, Screenshots, Videos, or another Photos-generated section, then use Select and drag across rows. After that, go straight to Recently Deleted and empty it, because until then you basically just moved the mess to a holding bin.
