My iPhone storage is almost full because my Photos app has thousands of pictures and videos, and I need help clearing everything out fast. I also want to find which photos and videos are taking up the most space first so I can free up storage without missing anything important.
I ran into this with an iPhone packed with around 20,000 photos. Storage warnings kept popping up, Photos would hang, and there still wasn’t any plain “delete everything” option in the main library. If you don’t know the order, you end up poking at the screen for ages and nothing changes.
Why your storage stays full after you delete photos
This trips up a lot of people. When you delete something in Photos, iOS does not remove it right away. It moves the file into Recently Deleted and leaves it there for up to 40 days. Until you clear that folder, your free space often stays the same.
If you want the storage back, do this:
- Open Photos.
- Tap Albums.
- Scroll down to Recently Deleted under Utilities.
- Tap Select.
- Tap Delete All.
If you skip Recently Deleted, the phone is still holding onto those files.
Why Photos starts choking on a huge library
I had better luck with small batches. Once the library got into the thousands, drag-select started lagging, freezing, or dumping me back out. Even newer iPhones do this when storage is already close to zero.
One workaround helped me a bit. I deleted one large app first, a game in my case, so iOS had some room to breathe while processing the photo removals. Without that, the phone kept stalling.
If the touchscreen route feels hopeless, use a computer.
On Mac, connect the iPhone and open Image Capture. You can select everything and remove it in one pass.
On Windows, open the DCIM folder in File Explorer after plugging the phone in. It works in a similar way, though I saw it act flaky once or twice depending on drivers.
A better approach for a giant photo library
Once you’re dealing with several thousand files, the stock Photos app starts feeling like punishment. I tried a few cleanup apps and most of them hit me with a paywall fast or pushed subscriptions before doing anything useful. Clever Cleaner stood out because it’s free, no ads, no paywall screens shoved in your face.
What worked for me:
- Open Clever Cleaner and start in Heavies. It sorts the whole library by file size, biggest first. You see right away which videos and photos are eating your storage.
- Clear items from the top first. I found a small number of giant videos freed more space than deleting piles of random photos.
- Move to Similars. It groups near-duplicate shots together, stuff like eight tries of the same receipt or ten photos of the same pet doing nothing new. You keep one and toss the rest.
- Check Screenshots. Each thumbnail shows the file size, so you know what you’re removing before you tap anything.
- It processes on the device. Nothing gets uploaded out to some server, which mattered to me because screenshots and photos often include private info.
The useful part was combining Heavies with Similars. Random bulk deletion is messy. Going after the biggest files and duplicate clutter got results faster.
One thing I’d check before deleting a lot
If iCloud Photos is on, deleting a photo from your iPhone removes it from iCloud and your other Apple devices tied to the same account. This catches people off guard.
If your goal is to clear local space without losing the full library, open Settings, then Photos, then check whether Optimize iPhone Storage is enabled. That leaves smaller versions on the phone and keeps the originals in iCloud.
If you already copied everything to a PC, Dropbox, or Google Photos, then wiping the phone library is less risky. I’d still double-check the backup finished. I learned not to trust progress bars.
After you’re done, empty Recently Deleted. That’s the step where the storage bar finally starts moving.
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Fastest path if you want everything gone.
First, use the storage screen, not Photos. Go to Settings, General, iPhone Storage, Photos. You’ll see how much space Photos uses. On some iPhones, iOS also flags Large Attachments and recently reviewed media nearby, which helps you judge if Photos is the real hog or if Messages is sneaking in too.
For finding the biggest files, I don’t fully agree with @mikeappsreviewer on doing this by hand first. If your library is huge, manual sorting is a time sink. iPhone Photos still does not give you a clean “sort by file size” view. That’s the dumb part. A cleaner app is faster here. Clever Cleaner is one of the few that makes sense for this job because it shows heavy videos and photos first, so you delete the worst offenders before wasting time on tiny stuff. If you want outside opinions, this thread is useful for real Reddit reviews of Clever Cleaner for freeing iPhone storage.
If your goal is delete all photos from iPhone fast, do this order:
- Back up what you care about.
- Turn off iCloud Photos first if you do not want deletions to hit your other Apple devices.
- Go to Photos, Library, All Photos, tap Select.
- Drag across rows, then scroll and keep selecting in chunks. It’s annoyng, but faster than one by one.
- Delete.
- Then check your storage again after a few mins.
If the Photos app keeps lagging, my hot take is this. Don’t fight the phone. A Mac or PC mass delete is often cleaner than poking a half-frozen screen for 30 minutes.
Also check Settings, Camera, Formats. If you shoot ProRAW, Cinematic, or lots of 4K60 video, a handful of clips might be eating multiple GB each. Deleting 20 big videos often beats deleting 2,000 small pics. Thats where Clever Cleaner helps most.
I’d do it a little differently than @mikeappsreviewer and @voyageurdubois.
If you want everything gone fast, the sneaky shortcut is Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Photos first. Not because it lets you nuke the whole library, it doesn’t, but because it often surfaces Apple’s own cleanup suggestions like Personal Videos, Screenshots, and Duplicates. Those categories are usually where the stupidly large files are hiding. It’s way faster than blind deleting.
For the biggest space hogs, honestly the stock Photos app is still kinda bad at this. You can use search terms like screen recordings, videos, slomo, 4K, ProRAW, or filter by media type in Albums. That at least narrows the pain. If you want an actual size-first view, Clever Cleaner is useful because the Heavies section puts the largest photos and videos up front, which is what you asked for. That saves a ton of time versus deleting 500 tiny pics and getting back like… 200 MB. Woohoo.
One thing I disagree on slightly: mass deleting from a computer is not always cleaner if iCloud Photos is syncing weirdly. I’ve seen it leave people confused about what’s local vs what’s still in iCloud. Before deleting all, decide this first:
- want them gone everywhere: delete normally
- want them gone only from iPhone: don’t just delete, change iCloud Photos settings or use Optimize Storage
Also, if your storage is critically full, restart the phone before doing a huge cleanup. Sounds dumb, helps more than it should.
And yeah, after deleting, Recently Deleted is the real final boss. If you don’t empty that, you basically cleaned nothing lol.
If you want a visual walkthrough, this video walkthrough for deleting iPhone photos and clearing storage fast is probly closer to what most people need.
Small disagreement with @voyageurdubois and @chasseurdetoiles here: if your goal is “clear space fast,” I would not start by trying to delete literally everything. The fastest win is usually deleting the biggest videos first, because 15 giant clips can free more space than 3,000 photos.
What I’d do:
- Check Settings > General > iPhone Storage and wait for the bar to finish loading
- Look at Review Personal Videos, Duplicates, and Screenshots if iOS shows them
- In Photos, go to Albums > Media Types > Videos and target long 4K clips first
- Also check Screen Recordings, Cinematic, RAW, and Slo-mo
For a true size-based view, the stock Photos app still falls short. That’s where Clever Cleaner is actually useful.
Pros of Clever Cleaner
- surfaces biggest files first
- easier than manual hunting
- can help spot duplicate clutter quickly
Cons
- still another app to grant photo access to
- cleanup suggestions are only as good as what you review
- some people prefer not using third-party cleaners at all
So I’d use Clever Cleaner for triage, then finish in Photos. And yes, @mikeappsreviewer is absolutely right about the last step: empty Recently Deleted, or your storage won’t come back right away.