How to Delete All the Photos on Your iPhone Using a Mac

It is really easy to take a lot of pictures using the high-quality camera on your iPhone, but it is equally difficult to manage those photos. For those of you who have an iPhone with just 16GB memory, you might often be facing issues of running out of memory.

At this point you can delete some unwanted photos from your iPhone to free up space. If you also have a Mac and have iCloud turned on in both your Mac and iPhone, the photos are all backed up to the cloud, and the library is synced between the two. You will have to concetrate your efforts on cleaning out your folder of recently deleted photos. If you don’t have that many in there you will need to free up memory elsewhere on your phone.

If you have a Mac and iPhone but do not use iCloud for your photos, yet have backed up all your photos to your Mac, you will notice that the photos still appear on your iPhone even though they have all been copied to your machine. The best thing you can do is delete all of the photos from your iPhone as you they are now available on your computer, but do you see an option for deleting all of the photos on an iPhone at once? There is no option.

In the following guide, we show you how you can delete all the photos on your iPhone at once using your Mac. Please note, though, that if you are using iCloud, this method won’t work as you will be deleting your synched photos.

Deleting All the Photos on an iPhone Using a Mac

The only app you need on your Mac to wipe all the photos off your iPhone is Image Capture. It should already be available on your Mac.

1. Plug in your iPhone to your Mac.

2. Launch Image Capture on your Mac.

3. Click on your iPhone in the “Devices” menu in the left-hand side of the app.

deletephotos-devices

4. You should be able to see all of your iPhone photos on the Image Capture screen. You can now select one, multiple, or all of the photos to be deleted. Since our aim was to delete all the photos, press “Command + A” on your keyboard to select all of the photos, and then click on the Delete icon in the bottom as shown below.

deletephotos-select

5. As soon as you click the delete button, you will get the following prompt asking if you would really like to delete the selected photos permanently. Click on the “Delete” button and it will begin deleting your photos.

deletephotos-delete

6. You should then find the Photos app on your iPhone to be empty which means all the photos are gone for good.

Conclusion

If you have both an iPhone and Mac and don’t use iCloud, yet would like to delete all the photos on your iPhone at once, the guide above should help you do that.

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Mahesh Makvana

Mahesh Makvana is a freelance tech writer who's written thousands of posts about various tech topics on various sites. He specializes in writing about Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android tech posts. He's been into the field for last eight years and hasn't spent a single day without tinkering around his devices.