I’m trying to free up storage on my iPhone and want to delete all photos except the ones I marked as Favorites. I can’t find a quick way to select everything else without going one by one. Is there a safe method in the Photos app, iCloud Photos, or a shortcut that can do this?
I get why this is annoying. Apple still doesn’t really give you a clean “delete everything except Favorites” option, even though that’s exactly what a lot of people need when Photos gets out of control. And once your library is huge, the whole phone can start crawling. Photos freezes, scrolling stutters, apps open slowly, all of it. I ran into this when my library was around 15,000 items and the phone was barely usable.
The main catch is that Favorites is not a real separate folder. It’s basically just a label on photos. So if you select your whole library and delete it, your favorites go with everything else unless you protect them first.
The safest built-in workaround is the Hide Method. Open your Favorites album, tap Select, then Select All. After that, use the three-dot menu or share menu, depending on your iOS version, and choose Hide. That moves those favorites into the Hidden album for the moment, so they won’t be sitting in the main library view.
Then go back to Recents or All Photos, select what’s left, and delete it. Afterward, open Hidden, select the photos you saved, and Unhide them. It’s kind of a clunky workaround, but if you’re doing this without a computer, it’s one of the safer ways to avoid wiping out the stuff you actually wanted to keep.
There’s also a newer approach if you’re on something like iOS 18.4. Make a temporary album for your favorites, maybe call it “Keepers.” Once they’re in there, go back to the main library view and check the filter button in the lower-left corner. If you can set it to “Not in Album,” you may be able to show only the photos that are not in that Keepers album, then delete those in bulk.
Just don’t rush that one. The filter can be weird, and it may not appear if you’re already inside an album instead of the main library feed. Double-check what’s selected before deleting anything.
If you’re okay using Shortcuts, that can also save a lot of tapping. Create a shortcut using Find Photos, then add a filter for photos where Is Not Favorite. Add another action to Create Photo Album, name it something like “To Be Deleted,” and run it. It should collect all the non-favorites into that album, where you can select everything and delete it from there. For a massive library, this is a lot better than trying to scroll and manually select thousands of items.
That said, when my phone was lagging so badly that Photos kept choking on basic selection gestures, the built-in options weren’t enough. I tried a few of the cleaner apps that show up in ads, and most of them were useless. Either they were packed with ads or they waited until the last step to ask for a subscription before actually deleting anything.
The one I ended up keeping was Clever Cleaner. It’s free, with no ads, no paywall, and no annoying “pro trial” thing. The bigger reason I liked it is that it works on-device, so your photos and screenshots aren’t getting uploaded somewhere just to be checked.
The Heavies tab was the part that made the biggest difference for me. It sorts your library by file size, which Apple Photos really should have by now. I found old 4K screen recordings and long videos I had completely forgotten about, and they were taking up more space than a couple thousand regular photos. That was the stuff causing the real storage problem.
The Similars tab is useful too. It groups photos that are almost the same, like all those slightly different shots of the same sunset or receipt or pet photo. You can keep the best one and delete the extras without going through them one at a time. For screenshots, it also shows the file size right on the thumbnail, so you can see what’s actually worth deleting. Clearing out the huge files and duplicates fixed the lag for me pretty much right away.
One last thing: deleting the photos is not the final step. iOS puts them in Recently Deleted for 30 days, and they still take up storage while they’re there. Go to Albums, scroll down to Recently Deleted, and use Delete All if you want the space back immediately. If storage still looks wrong after that, restart the phone. Sometimes iOS needs a reboot before it recalculates and finally drops the “Storage Almost Full” warning.
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Do not treat this as a phone-only cleanup if iCloud Photos is turned on. Deleting the non-favorites from the iPhone will delete them from iCloud and your other Apple devices too, so export or download anything you might want later before using the hide/shortcut method Mike described.
Cleaning up a local-only photo library is a different job from cleaning up an iCloud Photos library that is syncing to three devices. In the first case, you are freeing space on that phone. In the second case, you are changing the actual library everywhere, which is where people get burned.
The main thing I would not trust is a normal album as protection. If you make an album called “Keep” and put your favorites in it, that does not create copies. It only points to the same photos in your library. If you delete those photos from the main library, they are gone from the album too. So an album is useful for organizing or filtering, but it is not a safety net.
If you want the least risky built-in route on the iPhone, I would do it in this order:
- Open Favorites and check that the hearted photos are really the ones you want to keep.
- Back them up somewhere outside Photos first if they matter. AirDrop to a Mac, export to Files, copy to an external drive, or download them from iCloud Photos on a computer.
- Only after that, use a bulk method to remove the non-favorites.
- Check Recently Deleted before emptying it. Do not hit Delete All until you are sure.
That sounds slower, but it is faster than trying to recover a bad delete.
If you have access to a Mac, that is actually the cleaner way. The Photos app on Mac supports Smart Albums, so you can make a Smart Album where “Photo is not Favorite,” then select those items and delete them. That is much less fiddly than dragging your finger across thousands of thumbnails on an iPhone. Same iCloud warning applies though: if iCloud Photos is on, the deletion still syncs.
On iPhone only, I would treat Shortcuts as the better option than the hide trick if the library is huge. The hide trick can work, but it depends on you not accidentally selecting hidden items later, and it gets clumsy if the app reloads or lags. A shortcut that finds photos where Favorite is false gives you a more controlled batch to review. I still would not let it delete instantly. Have it collect the results first, then inspect the album or result set before deleting.
There is one annoying detail people forget: screenshots, videos, Live Photos, edited copies, and shared/saved images may not behave the way you mentally group them. A photo you “kept” because it looked important might have an un-favorited duplicate or edited version sitting elsewhere. So if you are doing this to free storage, sorting by videos and large files may get you more space with less risk than deleting every non-favorite photo. A few long videos can be bigger than years of normal pictures.
Clever Cleaner or a similar cleaner app can be useful for that specific job, especially finding large videos and similar shots, but I would not start with any app by giving it permission and blindly accepting its suggestions. Use it as a sorting tool, not as the final judge of what matters.
So the short answer is: no, the iPhone Photos app does not have a perfect “delete everything except Favorites” button. The safest version is backup first, then use Shortcuts or a Mac Smart Album to target non-favorites, then review Recently Deleted before emptying it. Albums alone are not protection.
Deleting photos is not always the right fix if iCloud Photos has “Optimize iPhone Storage” turned on. In that setup, many originals may already be off the phone, so deleting thousands of small non-favorites can sync a permanent library delete without freeing as much local space as you expect. Check Settings > Photos first, then target big videos/screen recordings before doing a mass non-favorites wipe.