deleting photos on phone with no delete option
I have photos that have no delete option. How can I save these and remove them without affecting all other photos and data on phone
iPhone 15, iOS 18
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Pictures that are transferred through a cable from a computer, perhaps with iTunes, can be shown by Photos, but they're not "owned" by Photos. So these pictures can't be edited or deleted by the Photos app, and they can't be synchronized with iCloud Photos. The idea is that the originals are kept on the computer, and they are transferred to the phone temporarily. One way to delete them is to use the computer to transfer an empty set of "pictures" to the phone, and the empty set will replace the others. In using iTunes for this, it may give the option to deselect the pictures that are already there. On a Mac we might do it with the app Image Capture in the Applications folder, but that's just with a Mac.
If you want to save some of these non-deletable pictures, then you can use "Share" to save them to Files. Then re-import them from Files to create fully useable versions.
Another way to get rid of all the non-deletable pictures is to momentarily turn on iCloud Photos. You get a scary warning that these will be deleted. When you say OK, then they're trashed, and then Photos will start to transfer the other pictures to iCloud--but you can turn off iCloud and stop the sync before it happens.