We have six versions for iOS and there is still no way to delete all your videos and images from the camera! This is annoying and I don’t understand why Apple didn’t pay attention to it. Ultimately, you keep taking photos and videos until you run out of free space and have to delete them.
If you’re like me, you can have all these photos and videos backed up with Google+, Facebook, Dropbox, or some other cloud storage app. In this case, you don’t even want to copy them to your computer, you just want to delete them all.
Unfortunately, if you want to delete your camera roll in bulk, you’ll have to connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC. Luckily, you don’t need to use iTunes for anything, so it’s a blessing. In this article, I’ll show you how to work with OS X and Windows.
Delete Camera Roll Completely – OS X
On OS X, you need to use Image Capture app to uninstall everything correctly. To open Image Capture, just hold down the Command key and press the Spacebar. This will open up Spotlight. Here enter Image Capture and press Enter.
The main image capture screen will open. Make sure your iPhone is connected to your Mac. It should automatically appear on the left, and you should see a list of all your images and videos.
Now you can do two things. You can either import all files and delete them after they’ve been imported, or if you don’t need to download images to your computer, you can just press CTRL + A to select all and then hit the little circle with a line across it icon.
Therefore, if you need to keep the files on your computer, check the “Delete after import” box and click the “Import all” button. If you don’t need to keep the files, just press CTRL + A and hit the delete button with a red circle. That’s all!
Delete Camera Roll Completely – Windows
If you have a Windows machine, you can also remove the film strip in one go. On Windows, you simply plug in your iPhone or iPad and it appears as a removable device in File Explorer.
It should appear automatically when you connect your iPhone or iPad to your Windows computer. Now just double click on it and follow the path to Internal Storage and then to DCIM.
Here you can see one or more folders depending on where the videos and photos are stored. All you have to do is delete any of the folders in the DCIM folder. If you go to the folder, you will see all your videos and photos inside.
That’s all. Not the best way in the world to get rid of everything in the film, but better than trying to put 5000 checkboxes on your phone! Hopefully iOS 7 has a new option to bulk delete all content in Camera Roll, but I feel like this post will still apply even after release. Enjoy!
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