My iPhone storage is almost full because I have thousands of old screenshots, duplicates, and random photos in the Photos app. I’m trying to find the fastest way to mass delete photos on iPhone without selecting each one individually. Is there an easier built-in method or setting I’m missing?
I ran into this after my iPhone kept nagging me about storage, even though I thought I’d already cleared out the obvious junk. Then I checked Photos and found more than 18,000 pictures sitting there. At that point, manually tapping photos one at a time was out of the question.
The easiest method depends on what you’re trying to delete. A few old trips? Use Photos. Screenshots? Apple already groups those. A massive messy library? You’ll probably want a faster cleanup tool or a computer.
Use the Photos app when you only need to delete a smaller batch
For a few hundred photos, or one specific event, the regular Photos app works fine.
- Open Photos.
- Tap Select in the upper-right corner.
- Drag your finger across photos instead of tapping each one.
- If there are a lot of them, pinch out to the Months view first so you can grab bigger chunks at once.
- Tap the trash icon when you’ve selected what you want gone.
This gives you the most control, but it gets old fast once you’re dealing with thousands of pictures.
Clear out whole media types like screenshots
If screenshots, screen recordings, bursts, or similar stuff are eating up space, don’t sort through your main library. Photos already separates those into albums.
- Open Photos.
- Go to the Collections tab.
- Scroll down to Media Types.
- Open something like Screenshots, Bursts, or Screen Recordings.
- Tap Select, then Select All.
- Delete them.
This is one of the few spots where Apple gives you a real Select All option, so it’s much less annoying than dragging through your whole camera roll.
Use Clever Cleaner if your photo library is huge
For a big library, Clever Cleaner saved the most time for me. Instead of making you hunt through thousands of photos manually, it sorts things into cleanup-friendly groups.
- Install Clever Cleaner and open it.
- Check Similars, where it groups near-duplicate photos and suggests the Best Shot to keep.
- Swipe away duplicate or similar shots you don’t want.
- Go through Screenshots if you want to bulk-delete those.
- Look at Live Photos if you want to turn them into normal still photos and save space.
- Check Heavies for large videos, since deleting one big video can free up more storage than deleting a bunch of regular photos.
I’m usually pretty skeptical of cleaner apps because a lot of them are subscription traps or packed with ads, but this one is free and handled a large photo library better than I expected.
Use a computer for bulk deleting
If you’re removing thousands of photos, doing it from a computer is a lot easier on your hands and patience.
- Open iCloud.com on your computer if you use iCloud Photos.
- Sign in.
- Hold Shift while clicking to select large ranges of photos.
- Delete the ones you don’t want.
- Wait for the changes to sync back to your iPhone.
A keyboard and mouse make this way less painful than dragging across the iPhone screen forever.
Factory reset only if you want everything gone
If you truly don’t need the photos or anything else on the phone, a reset is the fastest way to wipe it.
- Back up anything you might want later.
- Go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone.
- Tap Erase All Content and Settings.
- Follow the steps on the screen.
I wouldn’t do this if there’s any chance you still need something on the phone. But if you’re selling it, giving it away, or just want a clean start, it clears everything much faster than deleting photos by hand.
6 Likes
Deleting the photos is only half the job; your storage may not move much until Recently Deleted is emptied and the phone has had time to recalculate. After you trash a big batch, go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted, unlock it, then delete them from there too. Otherwise they can sit there for up to 30 days and still count against storage.
I agree with using the built-in media type albums first, especially Screenshots and Screen Recordings, but I’d be careful with duplicates and “similar” photos. Apple’s Duplicates album only catches exact or very close matches, so it may miss the ten almost-identical food pics or blurry versions. A cleaner app like Clever Cleaner can be useful for that kind of mess, but I would still review before deleting because “best photo” is not always the one you personally want to keep.
The other gotcha is iCloud Photos. If iCloud Photos is on, deleting from the iPhone deletes from iCloud and your other Apple devices too. If your goal is only to free space on the phone while keeping the photos, don’t mass delete. Turn on Settings > Photos > Optimize iPhone Storage instead, or move/export the photos somewhere else first. For actual bulk deletion though, the fastest safe order is: back up anything important, delete by albums or date ranges, empty Recently Deleted, then restart the phone and give storage a few minutes to update.
Deleting 3,000 screenshots is a different job from deleting 3,000 mixed camera-roll photos. For screenshots, screen recordings, and videos, use the Media Types albums because they’re already sorted for you. For the random stuff, I’d use Search in Photos more than people mention: search things like “receipt,” “whiteboard,” “car,” “food,” a city name, or a year/month, then select from those results. It’s much less painful than scrolling through the full library.
I’d avoid trying to delete your entire mess in one giant selection. The Photos app can get jumpy, and if your thumb slips or the screen locks, you may lose the selection. Do it in chunks, especially if iCloud Photos is on, because big deletes can take a while to sync and it’s easier to spot mistakes before you empty Recently Deleted.
Clever Cleaner or similar tools make more sense after you’ve removed the obvious junk. Let Apple’s albums handle screenshots and videos first, then use a cleaner app for the annoying “six versions of the same shot” problem. And for Apple’s built-in Duplicates album, use Merge rather than treating it like a normal delete pile, since that’s what it’s designed for.
Deleting from a normal album can fool you, because many albums are just references to photos in your library. If you open an album you made and hit “Remove from Album,” you did not free storage. You only took the photo out of that album. To actually clear space, you need the trash/delete option that removes it from the library, then clear Recently Deleted.
For the built-in Photos app, I’d use two different approaches depending on what you’re deleting. If it’s screenshots, videos, screen recordings, or bursts, the Media Types route others mentioned is the cleanest because Apple already separated them. If it’s old camera roll stuff by date, go to Library, zoom out to a larger view, tap Select, then drag across rows and keep your finger near the edge of the screen so it scrolls while selecting. It is clumsy, but it’s still faster than tap-tap-tapping thousands of times.
The annoying limitation is that Photos on iPhone still isn’t great at “delete everything except these 200 photos.” There’s no perfect invert-selection button. If you’re trying to keep only a small number, I’d honestly flip the plan: first save/export the keepers somewhere safe, confirm they’re actually backed up, then delete more aggressively. That’s less stressful than trying to perfectly select 9,000 throwaways on a touchscreen.
Clever Cleaner or similar apps make sense for the blurry/near-duplicate pile, but I wouldn’t use any cleaner as the first pass if storage is critically low. Start with the dumb obvious wins: large videos, screen recordings, downloads saved as screenshots, and old duplicates Apple already detected. Those free space faster and are easier to review. Then use a cleaner for the messy leftovers where the Photos app is weak.
Small practical thing: plug the phone in and temporarily set Auto-Lock to a longer time before doing a huge selection. Nothing is more irritating than spending five minutes selecting photos, the screen dims, and now you’re not sure what got selected. Delete in batches, empty Recently Deleted, then give the storage screen a few minutes to catch up.