iPhone tower · floor

How to delete all photos from iPhone, and where they go

Before any instruction for how to delete all photos from iPhone, there is one sentence from Apple that changes what the job is. It is on its own support page, above the steps, and it is the reason this floor puts it first too.

Apple’s own advice before starting is the ordinary one and worth not skipping: “Make sure that you back up the photos and videos that you still want.” It also gives the place to check the figure — Settings → General → [Device] Storage — which is worth reading before and after, since that number is the only way to see what a clear-out actually did.

The thirty days are the safety net, and they are also the reason a clear-out can look like it did nothing. Apple’s own description is that deleted photos are in Recently Deleted on the device until the period ends or you empty it. Whether that album counts against your storage is not something Apple states on this page, so the honest instruction is the one that removes the doubt: finish the second step, then read the storage figure rather than the other way round.

Apple names two confirmations at the end of that second step, and they are not the same choice.

This is the moment to be certain, because of the sentence Apple attaches to that album: you cannot get it back. There is no second bin behind the bin.

One more route worth knowing before deleting anything, because it can achieve part of what you wanted without deleting a single photograph you meant to keep. Apple documents a Duplicates album — Photos → Collections → swipe up → Duplicates under Utilities — with a Merge action, and Select All to do the lot. On what merging does, Apple is specific: “your phone combines the highest image quality and relevant data to keep one photo”. That is a reduction that costs you nothing, and it is a reasonable thing to try before a clear-out.

The floors below take it three ways: what happens across your devices, the two-step deletion itself, and the storage question that usually prompts all of this.

What this tower will not do

It will not tell you deleting on the phone keeps them elsewhere. With iCloud Photos on, Apple says the opposite, and that sentence belongs before the instructions rather than in a footnote.

It will not treat the first delete as the end of it. The space comes back when Recently Deleted is emptied, and Apple says what happens then in the bluntest words it uses on this subject.

And it will not suggest a photo cleaner app. Apple documents a Duplicates album with a merge action, on a screen the phone already has. What holds instead is simple: the warning about iCloud Photos deleting across devices, the thirty-day Recently Deleted period, both deletion routes and the two confirmations, the documented reason the Trash button can be grey, the Shared Library rules and the Duplicates merge behaviour are quoted from Apple’s support documentation, listed below.