Compared to many people I know, I don’t have a very large photo library. With about 1,300 photos, it takes up just under 6GB on my iMac. Many of my friends have thousands of photos and videos, and their libraries take up tens of gigabytes. But I don’t have any young children, and I don’t shoot a lot of photos when I’m out and about. (I do have two cats, one a kitten, who’s been getting snapped lately though.)
I recently noticed that my iPod touch, which I use for listening to music and for testing iOS betas, was running out of space. The culprit was my iCloud Photo Library. Even though I had the device set to optimize iPhone storage and not download all my photos, it was doing the latter. It had apparently downloaded all my original photos and videos, all 6GB of them. On a 32GB device, which also contains apps and music, that’s quite a lot of storage used up.
I decided I should turn off iCloud Photo Library on that device and delete all the photos. But you can’t do that; at least not easily. If you turn off iCloud Photo Library, the device retains all the photos and videos. And while I could manually delete each one of them, that was a time-consuming process.
There’s no way to mass delete photos on an iOS device.
Read the rest of the article on Macworld.