Undeletable iPhone Photos?

TidBITS Talk
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Post holiday digital cleanup here! Several hours deleting and renaming photos. Backups. Last step is to reduce clutter on iPhone (13 mini, 26.2).

Using Image Capture I whittled hundreds of photos on iPhone down to around 200. Went to iPhone to albumize the rest and… there were about 500 on there. Went back to IC, deleted several hundred again but in smaller batches. Quit IC, disconnected iPhone, shut down and restarted.

Still around 350 onboard. Selected small batches on iPhone and deleted. Got back around to 200ish and made another swipe thru and… found one photo that refuses to delete. I can select it or tap and hold, but Delete is not even an option!

I know I am ‘doing it wrong’ by Apple’s preferences. Not using iCloud, using Apple’s built in software to try to manage photos on a usb-connected iPhone, Mac & phone both on 26.2. Yes I know, horror! but still… It’s offered by Apple so it should, ah, work, right?

Is there anything obvious pointing to why photos would not delete or even not be deletable? Maybe the Trash Can is full… nope! deleted over 200, quit and launched Photos, undeletable one still won’t.

Anyway, not an urgent crisis, if anyone has encountered this and knows how to get IC and iPhone and Mac to work more effectively together, please chime in.

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Without getting into how you’re doing it and just a quick thought…is it yours to delete? That is, does it come via being part of a shared album?

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Great questions @tommy , thanks. It helps to have outside thought processes, part of why I ask so many dumb questions here…

The photo was taken with the same iPhone some months ago. I don’t used iCloud for photos at all, and have no shared albums. I make the snaps with iPhone and here and there plug in to my primary Mac, download them with Image Capture to a folder for further editing, back up the Mac, and now and then try to use IC to purge the images downloaded to Mac (faster for bulk work than on iPhone).

So pretty much always local, unshared.

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UPDATE: Today I started making screenshots of the issue and somehow noted that the image is in a ‘sync to iphone’ album I’d set up last summer in an unsuccessful test of local syncing between iPhone and Mac over usb. So @tommy was on the right track!

I tapped on the Album name and the Photos App quit itself. Re-opened, went to the Album, selected the photo and finally had a trash can icon lower right. Tapped, nothing happened despite having the icon there, and the icon did a little animation when tapped (as many now do), but took no action. No advisory window telling why it can’t be deleted.

So it appears the Mac has to so to speak authorize removal of the image from the iPhone. Will try that later.

1 Like
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On first attempt, in Finder I told iPhone not to sync the Mac folder where the problematic image resides, synced, and… it’s still on iPhone and non-deletable.