Google Photos Guide: How To Delete All Pictures From Your Account
Google is a software company at heart, and one of its best offerings is Google Photos — a service that lets you back up pictures and videos that you’ve taken with your smartphone. you’re able to then view, sort, and share them through the Google Photos app or website on any device. It isn’t just your everyday cloud storage solution — the extensive list of features makesfinding anything with Google Photosa breeze.
Examples include the ability to group faces of people and pets, search for images using text, color, or location, and create shared albums with your loved ones. Every Google account gets 15 GB of free cloud storage — and uploading the photos and videos from your phone to Google Photos is a great way oftackling an Android phone with low storagespace. Over time, however, your Google Photos library can get cluttered with images and screenshots you no longer need.
you’re able to always find and delete individual pictures, but sometimes it’s easier to start fresh. Unfortunately, Google Photos doesn’t offer a one-click solution to get rid of all the photos stored in the app. However, there are ways to delete pictures from Google Photos that are faster than manually tapping the delete button for every photo in your gallery.
How to delete pictures from Google Photos on a computer
Did you know that you can access the images stored on your Google account on any device, as long as you are connected to the internet? Photos you take on your phone can be automatically backed up and synced to the cloud to be accessed through the Google Photos app on Android, iOS, and even through a web browser on a desktop computer or laptop. Also, you can use the larger display of your PC to delete photos a bit quicker, here’s how:
You will notice that this trick only works for selecting a couple of hundred pictures at the same time. Unfortunately, this means that you will have to repeat the process manually until you get rid of every image stored on Google Photos.
How to delete pictures from Google Photos on a phone
Google Photos is also available as a free app for both Android and iOS. Most Android devices have the app preinstalled, while you can grab it on the App Store to install it on an iPhone or iPad. The process of deleting photos is similar on a phone too — you need to mass select images and then send them to the bin. Here’s how:
Although not very elegant, this is the fastest way to delete all pictures from the Google Photos app on your phone. Bonus tip — if you own an iPhone, try using the slider to the right while you’re gliding your other finger to select photos. This requires a bit of finger gymnastics, but it helped me select over 50,000 photos in a few seconds. Sadly, the same trick didn’t work on my Android phone.
Using Google’s storage manager to delete large videos
Manually selecting and deleting pictures from your Google Photos library can be a time-consuming process — but is sadly the only way to get rid of all photos and videos in the app. If you want to clear out some media files to create just enough space for future uploads, there is a much easier and more streamlined way of doing so. Google’s storage manager service comes built-in on all Android phones, and can also be accessed on the web through a browser. Follow these steps to create some storage space:
Clearing pictures and videos belonging to other categories such as screenshots or blurry photos will also help tofree up storage space on your Android deviceand the Google account associated with it.
