Deleting Photos

[Whitehill]

This has been a frustrating experience. I was traveling for a month last Fall and took thousands of photos. I loaded them on my iPad3 by reading the camera chips with my handy camera kit adapter. So far, so good.

When I got home, I pulled everything into iPhoto. Still OK. Then, because I had put the iPad through so much, I synced everything via iTunes. That's where, I think, things started to deteriorate, because ...

Back on the iPad, I wanted to delete most of the photos because they were all saved elsewhere, but the Photos app wouldn't let me! After surfing around, it appears one can't delete a photo once it has been synced to iTunes!? You have to go back to iTunes and explicitly deselect everything you want to delete from the iPad, and then resync. After all that, I could throw away everything on the iPad.

This seems very counterintuitive to me. Did I miss a step or two, or take a misstep or two? This ought to be easier.

 

[Whitehill]

And if that's counterintuitive, the next episode is even more counterintuitive - to me. After deleting all those photos, I noticed that my storage used had not reduced any! After more surfing, I found out why. The photos weren't really gone, just moved to an album named Recently Deleted. After a cooling off period of 30 days, the app finally throws them away. This is known as a feature. And there's no way, that I can find, to turn it off or even shorten the waiting period. Thanks a bunch.

 

[Cheryl]

You should be able to go to the Recently Deleted Photo album, hit Select at the top right, then just tap on a couple of photos. Now at the bottom of the screen you should see a trash can. Tap it. You will get a menu pop up from the bottom with two options: Delete # photos and cancel. When you select Delete, those photos should be gone.