How to Select All Photos on iPhone to Delete

If you tapped Select in the Photos app and went looking for a Select All button, stop hunting. There isn’t one in the main Library grid, and you didn’t miss a setting. Apple’s own instructions for deleting photos describe multi-select as “tap multiple photos or slide your finger across multiple photos” and never mention a Select All for the library.

Select All does exist on iPhone. It just lives somewhere more specific: inside an album, or inside a Media Types collection. Everything else is a drag gesture and a bit of patience.

Here’s the full map, including the part almost every other guide gets wrong.

Why there’s no Select All for your whole library

In iOS 26, opening the Library tab and tapping Select gives you a selection counter and nothing else at the top left. No Select All, no equivalent of the Cmd+A that works fine in Photos on a Mac.

People have asked Apple about this repeatedly. One Apple Community thread puts it plainly: you can only Select All from an album, not from the main view. Another asks outright why the button doesn’t exist, with no official answer.

The usual explanation is that a single mistap shouldn’t be able to erase a decade of photos. That’s the community’s reasoning, not a statement from Apple, so treat it as plausible rather than authoritative.

Two pieces of advice you’ll find elsewhere are simply out of date:

“Open the Recents album and tap Select All.” The Recents album was removed in the iOS 18 Photos redesign. It isn’t coming back. The closest things now are the Library grid itself and the Recent Days collection.
“Use the same shortcut as on Mac.” Cmd+A selects everything in Photos on a Mac. There is no touch equivalent in the iPhone Photos app, and no setting that adds one.

iOS 26 also restored the Photos tab bar, so Library and Collections are separate tabs again after the unified iOS 18 layout. Any guide describing a single endless scrolling view is a version behind.

Where Select All actually works: albums and Media Types

This is the useful half of the answer. Once you’re inside a specific album, Select All appears in the top left as soon as you tap Select.

The path:

Open Photos and tap the Collections tab.
Tap Albums (or Media Types).
Open the album you want to clear.
Tap Select at the top right.
Tap Select All at the top left.
Tap the trash icon and confirm.

One caveat before that last step: if iCloud Photos is on, deleting here removes those photos from every device on your Apple Account, not just this phone. There’s more on that below.

Apple doesn’t document this album-level button in its deletion or Photos guides. It’s observed behavior in the app, consistently reported by tech press and by users, but you won’t find a support page promising it.

The two highest-yield targets

Media Types collections are where this pays off, because they group things you almost never want to keep:

Screenshots. Receipts, error messages, half a conversation, a bank balance from 2021. Very close to pure junk, and there are usually thousands. This is the single best use of Select All on an iPhone.
Videos. Not the biggest count, but by far the biggest space per item. Clearing twenty long videos will move the storage bar more than clearing a thousand stills.

Selfies, Live Photos, Bursts, and Slo-mo collections work the same way if those are your problem areas.

The Duplicates album

Under Collections → Utilities → Duplicates, Apple does explicitly document a Select All: “tap Select, tap Select on each set or tap Select All, then tap Merge.” Merge combines the highest image quality and the relevant data into a single photo, and the leftover copies move to Recently Deleted rather than vanishing outright.

It requires iOS 16 or later, and it only catches near-exact matches. If nothing shows up, see why the Duplicates album sometimes comes back empty, and our full walkthrough of removing duplicates if you want the longer version.

Selecting a lot of photos in the Library with the drag gesture

For the Library grid, where there’s no button, dragging is the native method. Done properly it’s much faster than tapping.

Open the Library tab and tap Select.
Swipe horizontally across one row of photos first. This is the part people skip, and it’s what tells iOS you’re drawing a selection rather than scrolling.
Without lifting your finger, drag vertically. The grid scrolls, and everything you pass gets selected.
Drag back the other way to deselect if you overshoot.

There’s an accelerator worth learning: keep the drag going with one finger, then tap the top of the screen with a second finger. The view jumps upward while the selection keeps extending, which lets you cover months in a few seconds.

About that “500 photos” limit

You’ll see it stated confidently on a dozen sites: the iPhone caps you at roughly 500 photos per drag-select. That number has no source. It appears only in SEO content published by cleanup apps and the pages that copied them. Apple publishes no ceiling on how many photos you can select or delete at once, and no established publication has ever documented one.

What’s actually happening is more mundane and more useful to know. The Photos grid is virtualized: it renders thumbnails as you scroll rather than holding the whole library in memory. A drag-select reliably captures rows that have rendered. If you fling past a section faster than it can draw, rows in that gap can be missed. On large libraries the whole gesture also gets laggy, and one user in that Apple Community thread describes it struggling badly on a 15,000-photo library.

Which makes the practical advice pretty boring:

Drag at a pace the grid can keep up with, not as fast as your thumb can move.
Work in deliberate batches (a month, an album, a scroll-length) instead of one heroic sweep.
Check the selection counter at the top of the screen before you tap the trash. If it says 812 and you expected 1,200, you missed rows. Verify by counter, not by feel.

Before you delete: the iCloud warning

Read this before you tap the trash, not after.

If iCloud Photos is on, deleting on one device deletes on every device signed in to the same Apple Account. Your iPad, your Mac, photos.icloud.com: all of them. There is no “just on this phone” option for a normal delete.

For a phone-only cleanup there’s a separate approach for keeping photos in iCloud while clearing the phone, and it isn’t the delete button.

When you later empty Recently Deleted, the confirmation asks whether to Delete from All Devices or Delete Photos I Added. Read that dialog rather than tapping through it.

A greyed-out trash icon means something else entirely: those photos were synced onto the iPhone from a computer. Apple’s guidance is that they can’t be removed in the Photos app at all. You have to stop syncing them from the computer that put them there.

Deleting isn’t finished until Recently Deleted is empty

This is the step that sends most people back to search a week later. Deleting a photo moves it to Recently Deleted, where it stays for 30 days and continues to take up exactly as much space as it did before.

Your storage bar will not move until you empty that album.

The path, including the genuinely odd part:

Photos → Collections → Utilities → Recently Deleted.
Unlock with Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode. (Since iOS 16 this album is locked by default.)
Tap Select.
Tap Cancel, then tap Select again.
Tap the More button, then Delete All.
Confirm.

Step 4 is not a typo. It comes straight from Apple’s own instructions: “If you want to delete all the photos and videos in the album, tap Cancel, then tap Select again.” Most guides tell you to tap Select and then Delete All, which doesn’t match what’s on your screen. That mismatch is why people assume the option is missing.

There’s more on how the 30-day window actually behaves, and on what to do when the storage number still refuses to budge afterward. Check the real figure at Settings → General → iPhone Storage, and give it a few minutes to recalculate.

The Shortcuts method for rule-based sweeps

If your criterion can be written as a rule (“every screenshot older than a year,” “everything from that one trip”), Shortcuts will do the selecting for you.

Open Shortcuts and create a new shortcut.
Add the Find Photos action.
Add filters: media type is screenshot, date range, album, whatever fits.
Add the Delete Photos action underneath.
Run it.

One prerequisite that trips people up: the large-data behavior for Shortcuts lives in Settings → Shortcuts → Advanced. Apple documents that pane for sharing permissions, and tech coverage of screenshot-deleting shortcuts points to a parallel toggle for deleting large amounts of data. If your shortcut errors out on a big batch, that’s the first place to look.

And the same caveat applies: Shortcuts deletes into Recently Deleted, so you still have to empty it.

Where this method falls down is the criterion most people actually have. “Is this photo any good” is not a filter. No date range or media type expresses it.

When Select All is the wrong tool entirely

Most people typing “select all photos to delete” don’t actually want an empty library. They want the 4,000 junk photos gone and the 300 good ones kept.

Select All can’t do that. It’s all or nothing by design, so for a lot of readers the honest answer is triage rather than a faster way to wipe.

That’s what Swipe44 is for. It breaks the camera roll into decks (Recents, Random, or month by month) so you never face the whole library in one grid, and gives you one swipe per photo: right to keep, left to mark for deletion. Duplicates and near-duplicates get grouped on-device with perceptual hashing, so you review a cluster at once instead of finding them by eye. Marked photos collect in a pending pile you can review before anything is destroyed.

To be precise about the delete step: Swipe44 does not bypass the iOS confirmation dialog. Nothing can. It batches the whole pile into a single system confirmation instead of one per group, then shows you how much space you actually freed.

It runs entirely on the device. No account, nothing uploaded, and iCloud originals are never downloaded just to be reviewed. Your photos never leave the phone.

If that sounds closer to your problem than a Select All button, get the app. If you’d rather keep going manually, the swipe-to-delete approach in general is worth understanding first.

The short version

No Select All in the Library grid. That’s iOS behavior, not a bug or a hidden setting.
Select All works inside albums and Media Types collections. Screenshots and Videos are the highest-yield targets.
In the Library, use the drag gesture: horizontal across a row first, then vertical, plus the two-finger tap-top trick.
Ignore the “500 photo” limit. It isn’t real. Watch the selection counter instead.
Check iCloud Photos before you delete, because it deletes everywhere.
Empty Recently Deleted, with the Select, Cancel, Select again sequence, or nothing gets freed.

More on clearing out a camera roll over on the blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is there no Select All button in the iPhone Photos app?

There isn't one in the main Library grid. Apple's documented multi-select is tap-or-slide only. Select All appears once you open a specific album or a Media Types collection and tap Select. The usual explanation, that a single tap shouldn't be able to wipe an entire library, is community reasoning rather than anything Apple has stated.

How do I select all photos on iPhone without tapping each one?

Tap Select, swipe horizontally across one row first, then drag your finger vertically without lifting it. The grid scrolls as you drag. To cover a long stretch quickly, hold the drag with one finger and tap the top of the screen with a second finger.

Is there a limit to how many photos I can select and delete at once?

Apple publishes no numeric limit. The widely repeated 500-photo cap has no authoritative source. What is real: the grid renders thumbnails as you scroll, so a drag only picks up rows that have actually loaded, and very large selections get sluggish. Work in batches and check the selection counter at the top of the screen before tapping the trash.

Why is my storage still full after deleting photos?

Deleted items sit in Recently Deleted for 30 days and still occupy space. To empty it: Photos, Collections tab, Utilities, Recently Deleted, unlock with Face ID or Touch ID, tap Select, tap Cancel, tap Select again, then More and Delete All.

Will deleting photos on my iPhone delete them from iCloud and my other devices?

Yes, if iCloud Photos is turned on. Deleting on one device deletes on every device signed in to the same Apple Account. When you empty Recently Deleted, the confirmation asks whether to Delete from All Devices or Delete Photos I Added.

How do I delete all screenshots on iPhone at once?

Photos, Collections tab, Media Types, Screenshots, then Select and Select All and the trash icon. This is where album-level Select All pays off most, because screenshots are almost entirely disposable.

Why is the trash icon greyed out when I try to delete a photo?

Those photos were synced to the iPhone from a computer rather than saved on the device. They can't be deleted in the Photos app. You have to stop syncing them from the computer that put them there.

Does the Duplicates album have a Select All option?

Yes, and it's the one place Apple documents it directly. Photos, Collections, Utilities, Duplicates, tap Select, then Select All and Merge. Merging combines the highest image quality and relevant data into one photo, and the extra copies move to Recently Deleted.