We show you how to free up space on your iPhone by deleting locally stored photos
We show you how to permanently delete photos from your iPhone.
Storage is at a premium on your smartphone or tablet, and you can still fill up even the most capacious device with music, movies and photos. It's one of the things that makes cloud storage such an attractive proposition - enable iCloud on your iPhone 5 and you can store your beloved photos elsewhere, and still access them on your smartphone.
That doesn't stop your iPhone filling up with photos, however. Every time you take a snap it will be stored locally as well as in your cloud. That can cause problems if you are also downloading multiple podcasts, say, and TV shows. You don't want to miss out on your favourite podcast because you went to a party and took so many photos there isn't room for the audio.
So it makes sense to regularly cull photos from the local storage on your iPhone. Here's how to delete photos from your iPhone.
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Open the 'Photos' app. It's the application with a large sunflower on it:
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There are three options along the bottom: Albums, Photo stream, Places. You don't need to worry about 'Places', and 'Photo Stream' is your images in the cloud. You need to make sure you are in 'Albums'.
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Here you'll see all the images stored locally on your iPhone, arranged in the albums you created. You can delete images from individual albums, but that won't help with the overall storage issue.
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To remove photos and free up storage head to your iPhone's Camera Roll. To delete each individual shot, simply open it up by clicking the thumbnail and hitting the trash can symbol in the bottom right of the screen. If you have lots of photos this can be labour intensive, however. (We show you a better way below...)
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Far easier is to go back to the Camera Roll screen, and hit the Edit button in the top righthand corner of the screen. Then simply select all the photos you wish to delete by tapping their thumbnails...
...Finally, hit Delete, in the bottom righthand corner of the screen, and hit Delete Everywhere to confirm your actions. Your photos are now only in your iCloud stream, and your phone has additional space.
Comments
Anabelle Petersen said: Unfortunately following your advice I deleted all my videos as well not knowing they are NOT automatically backed up on photo streami-cloud I lost all videos of my 3 young children I wish I had known that before
Alpa@lpa said: Or you can use iFunBox and delete all files connected with photos in folders DCIM PhotoDataDCIM PhotodataMISC Do not delete folders except for 100APPLE 101APPLE etc
saturn said: i have also faced that problem but you know what i have figured it out just goto the summary bar in the itunes and goto the option devices and select your device from which you were whish to remove the photos now go to the photos option and click the selected folder now you have the folders from where you have copied it now unselect all the folders or if it is unselected then its ok now click the sync button and you will see that all the photos from your device are completly vanished i think this will helps you
Matt Egan said: Im afraid you cant to my knowledge
Omar said: I want to delete photos from camera roll but also I want to keep them in the album how can i do this Every time I select delete it says delete every where but I want to delete it only from camera roll
CSSqu said: I agree PTMMAC Im having the same problem Why would they do something so idiotic
ptmmac said: The problem is that the iPhone 5 with the newest version of software has started making it impossible to remove pictures from the phone once they are downloaded to your computer and added to photo library I was able to delete all I wanted from the camera roll but none from the photo library This a recent and very frustrating change If you realize you are out of data because your son took some videos with your phone and they are no longer in the camera roll it is very hard to find anywhere to delete them from impossible without iphotoThis is really frustrating when you cant take a picture because the way you have been deleting pictures for the last 5 editions of the iPhone has been changed I am quite sure someone complained because they didnt want their kids to delete important photos
donkey said: what a joke this doesnt work do you even own an iphone