The iPhone is known to integrate one of the best cameras in the smartphone industry. It’s one of the best tools to capture memorable photos, and yet packing its memory is quite easy. And when your phone starts getting full, it’s the beginning of the annoying task – deleting photos.
Some iPhone owners take so many pictures that removing from them the smartphone manually becomes too much of a chore. Thus, they look to use third-party solutions, such as a MacBook and delete iPhone photos that way.
But the question is, how to delete photos from iPhone on Mac? In this article, we will discuss possible ways to remove photos from the iPhone on Mac as well as on the smartphone itself using built-in and professional tools.
Delete Photos From iOS on macOS
Deleting iPhone pictures on Mac is easy and can be done using a default app. First, you need to import all photos to a folder on your Mac. What if we tell you that you won’t even have to import your pictures on your Mac to remove them permanently from the iPhone. Yes, you can do it following the given steps.
- Connect your iPhone to Mac and confirm it can trust the computer.
- Launch Image Capture and press down Command + A to select all photos.
- Tap on the little circle available at the bottom next to the Import to option.
- Confirm your action and delete photos.
The entire process is really simple. But keep in mind that Image Capture will remove your photos permanently from the iPhone rather than moving them to the Recently Deleted folder or Trash folder on your Mac. You may only use Image Capture if you wish to delete the photos permanently.
After deleting photos from the iPhone, if you wonder how to find recently deleted photos and restore them on the computer, read further.
Delete Photos Permanently From iPhone
When clicking images on an iPhone, you usually capture more than one shot of the same photo. Instead of keeping the best one and deleting all other clicks, we store all of them, which saturates the phone’s memory. Over time, the storage balloons, and you are left with no other option rather than to delete unnecessary files permanently from the device.
But how to do that? Even if you delete photos from your iPhone, they will move to the Recently Deleted folder, which is a Trash inside the Photos app. The photos you delete from the iPhone will remain there in the Recently Deleted folder for the next 30 days. This is sometimes good as it allows you to restore accidentally deleted photos.
But the downside is that the photos stored in Recently Deleted will occupy the same space and won’t help much in claiming extra gigabytes on the hard drive. You need to delete these photos manually.
- Launch the Recently Deleted folder.
- Click on Select available in the top-right section.
- Now select the Delete All option displayed in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
- Alternatively, you can select several photos that you are sure you won’t need.
- Click Confirm.
Delete Multiple Photos From iPhone
Deleting pictures from the iPhone is easy, and you can remove them by navigating to the Camera Roll.
- In the Camera Roll, click on the Select option available in the top right corner.
- Select each photo you want to remove from the iPhone and tap on the Trash icon displayed in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
- A Confirmation pop-up appears; tap Delete N Photos to remove all selected photos altogether.
The photos from the Camera Roll and any albums will move to the Recently Deleted folder in the Photos app. You might have noticed that some of the photos that you attempt to delete are still there. Why so?
Why Are Some Photos Not Deleted From the iPhone?
The answer is simple; when you are not able to delete several photos from your iPhone, the reason is that the Trash icon is disabled for these photos and albums. The chances are that you synced these photos from your computer via iTunes and that they are not clicked from the iPhone.
A re-sync can help fix the issue. If you are looking to delete all unnecessary files and searching for more ways how to delete photos from iPhone on Mac, here’s the solution.
- Connect your iPhone to your Mac.
- Open iTunes and select your device.
- Navigate to the Photos tab.
- Click on Selected albums and uncheck the photos and albums that you want to remove.
- At last, click Apply to complete the photo deletion process.
By doing this, you will remove photos from your iPhone that you were not able to delete earlier. It’s a simple method, but you have to be careful while deleting photos to prevent deleting important images.
That’s why we recommend backing up computers regularly to avoid data loss incidents. In case you remove any important files accidentally, consider restoring them from Time Machine backup if you have one. Alternatively, recover files from iCloud storage. If nothing works, a professional data recovery tool can be an ideal way to recover accidentally deleted data.