How to delete one or all photos on your iPad

It’s good to scrub unwanted photos and videos on your iPad from time to time. This keeps things organized, and frees up storage space — not just on-device, but in iCloud, which can save you from having to pay for an iCloud Plus plan. Here’s how to delete individual items from your Photos library, or at the extreme, absolutely everything.

How to delete photos on an iPad

• To delete a single photo or video, tap on it in the Photos app, then hit the Trash button. Choose Delete Photo or Delete Video.
• To delete multiple items, navigate to the relevant Photos folder, then tap Select. Choose what you want to remove and tap the Trash button. You’ll be asked to confirm.

How to delete all photos on an iPad

We strongly recommend against doing this, since chances are there are least a few photos and videos you want to keep, and anything you delete from your iPad will disappear from your linked iCloud account as well. But if that’s what you’re after, here’s how to do it:

• Open the Photos app and select the All Photos tab within the Library view.
• Tap Select.
• Tap and hold on the last item, then drag your finger upwards until all the items in your library are selected.
• Tap on the Trash button and confirm the deletion.

How to permanently delete photos on an iPad

Thankfully, media you delete doesn’t vanish right away — it’s moved into a Recently Deleted sidebar folder, which only permanently deletes things older than 30 days. You can restore individual items by selecting them in the folder and tapping Recover.

To permanently delete photos and videos, go into Recently Deleted, hit Select to choose items, then tap Delete. Use this sparingly — there’s no going back.