How do I manage iPhone Photos? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

It's 2015, I'm running iOS 8 on an iPhone 5s with a the latest Photos on Yosemite and I still have no understanding of what's going on with iCloud / Photos management OS X and iOS.


That is: how do I clear out my Camera Roll without manually deleting 500 photos after a vacation? I'm stumped.


My photos go to photo stream. I physically sync my iPhone to my Mac and it imports photos not yet iCloud-synced. But the process always leaves my Camera Roll intact on my iPhone. And I'm left to manually delete the Camera Roll to reclaim 1.5 GB of storage.


I can't find a "Delete Imported Photos" option. THere's a "Delete items after import", but that only works on photos that get imported. Photos already synced via iCloud / Photostream don't work with that option.


I can import previously imported photos, deleting them from the Camera Roll. But then they're duplicated in OS X Photos and I have to manually delete the dupes there.


I like to think I'm fairly OS X and iOS savvy compared to the average joe, but I remain flummoxed by photo (mis)management on the Mac and iPhone. Can someone help me?


Thanks

 

[kathy13xia]

Try this . access the Usage option under the General section of the Settings app and tap on Photos & Camera. This time swipe your finger across the Camera Roll item in the list to reveal a Delete button. By clicking on thus button you will remove all photos from your iPhone’s Camera Roll. This action is not reversible, so be sure you are willing to delete all photos before you tap on the Delete button.

 

[DaveF]

Thanks for the idea, but those controls and delete option is nowhere to be found on my iPhone running iOS 8.4. Maybe this was a feature in iOS 6,but removed with the major revision of iOS 7.

I'll play some more later, but I don't see a single delete ability through the Settings app or the Photos app.

 

[Thomas Newton]

This Apple Support article talks about deleting synced photos from a device using iTunes:


https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201313

 

[DaveF]

Thanks, but that's not it either That's for managing what is synced to an iOS device from Photos Library: what photos get copied to or removed from the iPhone during a sync. It doesn't touch the Camera Roll.

 

[DaveF]

I submitted this as an enhancement request to Apple.


It's an obvious problem. It must plague everyone who uses an iPhone. I don't understand how they missed it.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Dave:

Don't know if you ever resolved this, but I happened upon this thread while looking for another.

I recently wanted to delete all the photos from my Camera Roll (after having safely backed them all up to my laptop and external drives).

The thing is, I also wanted to keep a select number of them.

I have a 64GB iPhone 6...which I use often for picture-taking. I had 9,000 images on it!

There is an app called "Deleter" (99-cents at the app store) which allows you to delete the entire camera roll (or any album) with ONE BUTTON PUSH! But it also saves any image you have selected as a favorite. THIS was perfect for me! I saved several hundred images while deleting several thousand and clearing out more than half of the phone's capacity.

The ONE BUTTON PUSH actually moves all those images to the "Recently Deleted" folder which gives you that added protection of making certain you are happy with the results.

Highly recommended.

 

[Alf S]

Photos and lack of storage is what drove my daughter crazy with her 6. It was 16GB version. She ended up using Google Photos to handle her photo storage issues etc.

This is just one of the oddities of the iphones that made me jump ship I LOVE that I can plug my phone into any computer and drag and drop any file to and from it...music, photos, documents. SO SO much better than being tied to some pricey exclusive "Cloud" of Apples and being locked out fo the drag and drop computer world.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I don't keep photos on my iPhone; I don't see the point. I let Photos import any pics and videos from my iPhone when I plug it into my Mac, then delete them from the phone after import so I am never at a loss for space. You can also do this on a PC so you don't have to own a Mac. I also don't back up any music or photos to iCloud since my internet connection is pretty slow and a restore from iCloud would take hours if not days. Everything is backed up locally and iCloud just handles notes, contacts, etc...

 

[Mike Frezon]

I have never had a problem exporting photos manually from my phone onto my PC. They are all stored chronologically on the phone (1000 images per folder) and you just select 'em and copy/paste. Easy peasy.

The app I mentioned above just makes the deletion of the images off the phone VERY easy (after you are comfortable with your backups).

 

[TJPC]

We seem to have many photos which we can see on our phone, but which will not download to our PC because they are trapped "in the cloud", and we don't know how to get them out.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Terry:

When you connect the phone to your PC, do you navigate (via File Explorer) to the phone and then go into the phone's file system to find the image folders? That's instead of going through iTunes or any other such software.

I should think all the images would be contained in those folders...if they are on your phone.

 

[TJPC]

Thanks! We will try this.

 

[DaveF]

Dave:

Don't know if you ever resolved this, but I happened upon this thread while looking for another.
.

It's solved for me now. I pay the $0.99/mo for 50GB iCloud storage and enabled iCloud photos. I no longer think about photo management. It's all automatic now.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Thanks! We will try this.

Hey Terry:

Here's an image which will show you what I'm talking about. The older pictures will be in the folders with the lowest numbers.

Here's what the folder structure I'm talking about looks like. Good luck!

 

[DaveF]

We seem to have many photos which we can see on our phone, but which will not download to our PC because they are trapped "in the cloud", and we don't know how to get them out.

If you've got Photo Stream turned on, you might need to go through the iCloud interface. Read the bits specific to your computer OS.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201317

 

[DavidJ]

It's solved for me now. I pay the $0.99/mo for 50GB iCloud storage and enabled iCloud photos. I no longer think about photo management. It's all automatic now.

Is that all it is? I thought it was a lot more.

 

[DaveF]

Is that all it is? I thought it was a lot more.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

In a world where people expect their phones and apps to be free, $1/mo in internet money is like a mortgage payment.