How to properly delete all photos without having to factory reset iphone?

[Kaikidan]

I have a 64gb iphone 11, even with iCloud activated photos are taking 20gb of storage! I want to delete all photos from photos app so I can use Google Photos instead, or any other app that uses less space, but I don't want to restore the device, re-pair apple watch, etc.. etc.. is there a way to delete all photos that the phone insists on keeping in the memory so i can safely disable icloud photos without having to nuke it to factory settings?

 

[mikzn]

Have you tried using Photos? - you can transfer the Photos to your Mac Mini and check off the "delete items after import"

 

[HDFan]

check off the "delete items after import"

Don't do that! Only delete the photos when:

1. You have made the copy to a local folder (downloaded the originals from iCloud) and verified that all have been transferred in the quality you desire.

2. Made your 3-2-1 backups of the folder

3. You have uploaded the folder to google photos

You don't want to delete the photos until you know that you have 3 good copies.

I would verify that Google Photos takes less space before pulling the plug on Apple Photos. Make sure that you prefer it.

But before you do all this I would check my Photos settings. My library is ~400 GB in size yet Photos on my iPhone uses just ~9 GB of data.

 

[akash.nu]

What’s the total size of photos on your iCloud storage?! If optimise storage is turned on then don’t worry about the space taken by the photos, it’ll automatically get offloaded if your device requires more physical storage.

As you can see on my phone it’s only taking 2.3GB

But on my iCloud storage I have majority of 132GB is taken by photos.

 

[cynics]

When iCloud Photos are turned on there are only a few reasons it would keep 20gb of photos on the iPhone.

1. You have "Download and Keep Originals" turned on instead of "Optimize iPhone Storage". This is found in Settings > Photos.

2. You recently looked through a lot of photos and video and the full res versions were downloaded to the iPhone. If that is the case they will eventually disappear from the device.

3. You have A LOT of available free storage on the iPhone. Since its much more efficient for iOS to do nothing unless there is a reason (ie not a lot of free storage) iOS just hold onto photos. To optimize storage iOS needs to verify the photo integrity, construct a low res version for your iPhone, issue a delete command for the space (NAND storage can't be over written it needs to be deleted before the space can be used), cause wear and tear on the NAND (it has a finite life), perform garbage collection to optimize the space, all while using data, battery life and computation power. Then you look at the full res version two days from now and it redownloads them the very thing it deleted. Using more network data, writing the same data back to the storage, etc etc. All to arbitrarily free up storage space that wasn't needed. 20gb seems like a lot so that is unlikely the case (assuming you dont have 100gb free).

4. You don't have enough iCloud space (20gb of data wont fit into a 5gb hole).

Google Photos is preferred method for a lot of people. Deleting the photos (high/low res version) from the Photos app deletes them from iCloud. I would recommend having a physical and accessible back up before doing anything, Then you'll just need to upload the photos to Google (Google offers 15gb of storage for free, if you have 20gb of photos you'll need to upgrade for 1.99 a month). Once they are uploaded and verified you can delete them from the photo all.

If it is a situation that you do have a lot of free space there is a chance even after you manually delete the photos it space will become cached data for a while. Again, if iOS can use space you are using to enhance performance by reducing overhead it will.

 

[contacos]

If you want to get rid of the 20 GB of locally stored photos just deactivate iCloud Photos, wait for it to actually be done! Then delete all the remaining photos (it will be the ones that have actually been downloaded and since you deactivated iCloud photos, it will not sync the removal of those photos back to iCloud), once deleted, activate iCloud Photos again and your photos will appear again (with most of them in the cloud).

iCloud Photos should not take much space. I have a 128 GB iPhone, with 83 GB free and iCloud Photos still only takes up 4 GB of data on my phone. Not sure what exactly happened in your case unless you viewed a lot of those videos / photos recently

 

[BrianBaughn]

For comparison, my Google Photos data is using 23MB.