Quickly Emptying the iPhone Camera Roll
And you may have discovered that you can only select your photos one at a time — there is no “select all” option to be found. While this is a good way to selectively trim the size of your Camera Roll, there is now another way to delete all your photos.
Again 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.
I tried this with iOS 7, but the Delete button didn’t appear when I swiped. I’ve also heard that in the Photos app you can two-finger swipe to batch select photos; that doesn’t work for me either. So, as far as I can see, the only way to delete photos from the iPhone’s camera roll (without using a Mac or PC) is to tap them individually.
iPhoto on the Mac makes it easy to delete photos that have already been imported. Aperture does not, so I end up having to use Image Capture if I don’t want my phone to fill up. Of course, neither of these methods works if you use Wi-Fi syncing or otherwise don’t connect the iPhone directly to the Mac.
The other photo management problem I have is that Photo Stream always stores the 1,000 latest photos on the phone. That’s nearly 1 GB gone that I will never use, since my processed photos are all on Flickr. The only way around this seems to be turning off Photo Stream. You can’t turn off downloads without also turning off uploads. So then my new photos wouldn’t be backed up, and I would have to USB connect whenever I wanted to import them.
You can, however, manually delete photos from Photo Stream after they’ve been imported. This frees up space on the iPhone as well as the Mac’s SSD.
