Why is it so hard to delete all photos on ipad? All the methods involve selecting a few at a time but i need to delete 50000 photos. Flattening the device would be faSTER than deleting using the desribed methods
iPad, Windows 7, trying to access Outlook calendar
Thanks, but I have 20 years of photos to delete. So that's about 7300 days or "moments" to go though. There really ought to be a better way to do this. Even that monstrosity iTunes won't let you bulk delete photos.
Honestly, it's looking like it would be faster to flatten the device. Only Apple could have the ignorance blended with the arrogance to have such a shortcoming.
Thanks, but I have 20 years of photos to delete. So that's about 7300 days or "moments" to go though. There really ought to be a better way to do this. Even that monstrosity iTunes won't let you bulk delete photos.
Honestly, it's looking like it would be faster to flatten the device. Only Apple could have the ignorance blended with the arrogance to have such a shortcoming.
Thanks. That seems to be the best method but it's still very slow. It scrolls very slowly. I sit for several minutes of scrolling and only a few hundred are eventually selected. And, I can only select a few hundred at a time, otherwise the delete process doesn't work. It does work if I select a few hundred at a time, but with 50,000 photos to delete, it's still going to take a long time.
A Select All option would be nice. Microsoft has this in all of their file management programs. Why doesn't Apple?
Yes, but consider the case where there are 20+ years of photos. That means there are roughly 7300 "clusters" of photos that you have to manually select. Do the math and you're looking at about 6 hours to delete everything by using that method. That's not good.
Thanks Michael. That seems logical but it's not working for me. I have the "Sync Photos" check box cleared (see attached), and I did a sync, but the photos remain. I've very slowly managed to delete about a third of them but it's really tedious and time consuming. It's stuff like this that makes me curse Apple. It's not something that should be this hard.
I ended up installing the iTunes "malware" on a disposable PC, and then was able to access the iPad\Internal Storage\DCIM folder where the photos are stored in many subfolders containing about 500 photos each. I'm gradually going through those and then manually selecting\deleting the contents.
Sheesh. The iPad is a brilliant device but as for Apple's implementation of this, what an amazingly grotesque system!
Thanks to the folks that sent me suggestions.
If you sync your photos using iTunes to your computer, all you need do is select none for photos, sync, and poof, they‘re gone from the device. Just make sure you‘ve first moved any new photos over to your computer‘s ph Library first.
Assuming you’ve been sync’ing with the computer all along, just disable “photos“ altogether in your sync settings. Then execute a manual sync. Same thing works to remove all your music, or all your iBooks. If you disable those sync categories altogether then the data that was being sync’d will be removed from the device.
Just be absolutely sure you‘ve first transferred all the photos you want to keep into your computer’s photo library.
You can select a whole bunch of photos for deletion and not just one or a few at a time.
Start the Photos app. In the Camera Roll Album tap Select then tap on the first photo. Then tap and slide down to scroll through your photos and select them at the same time. Keep sliding down until all the photos are selected then tap Delete.
This moves the photos to the Recently Deleted album. That can remain there for 30 days should you want to recover them. This feature was added after so many people complained about accidentally deleting important photos.
If you are sure you want all photos deleted you can delete all of the photos at once from the Recently Deleted album.
I thought it works like this on the iPad:
Open the Photos app, it opens and shows all photos in folders dates and so on. after each there is "select", tap select for all those clusters, then select the trash icon on top of he window.
Or: open Photos, select "albums" on the bottom, then tap "edit" on top, click the minus sign on the albums.
After I did this, Apple managed to restore all of the photos to my iPad. Thanks a lot. Sync is turned off. Why did that happen?
This really *****. I have two iPads that are practically disabled because they are full and I can't do anything about it.
Here's the thing: I thought I'd buy an Apple cloud space subscription to back up my photos. I did not realize at the time that Apple would then download copies of the photos to my iPads. Even at reduced resolution, my 20+ years of photos are now forced onto my iPads and I can't delete them all.
The only available method is to manually select each cluster of photos in the Photos app. Each cluster represents one date. I have 20+ years of photos. That means there are roughly 7300 "clusers" of photos that you I to manually select. Do the math and you're looking at about 6 hours to delete everything by using that method.
I will cancel my subscription for the cloud space. I hope that will cause Apple to delete whatever store they are using to sync the photos to my devices.
What a ******* way to do business, Apple. This is the sort of garbage arrogance that causes people to despise Apple. Microsoft would not pull this sort of crap.
Really? You must have very fast fingers and a much faster iPad than me. . I've spent over 1/2 an hour deleting days, and I've barely put a dent in them.
I respectfully propose that:
a: you haven't actually tried this.
b: you haven't actually given any thought to your answer.
c: you are completely wrong.
If you go to the photos app, then where it says moments at the top, you can tap on select and delete them by the day, which should go a bit faster than one at a time.
Really? Do you mind being more specific about how to do that? I connected the iPad to iTunes, but it wasn't clear how to do that. Thanks!!
I have 20 years of photos, more than 50'000 and these are grouped in many clusters but not so many that it would take more than 5 minutes to select them all.
New iPad Pro (6 months). And the albums are organised automatically.
Why is it so hard to delete all photos on ipad? All the methods involve selecting a few at a time but i need to delete 50000 photos. Flattening the device would be faSTER than deleting using the desribed methods
