My iPhone storage is almost full, and I want to delete every photo except the ones I marked as Favorites. I’m trying to do this without downloading a third-party app, but I can’t find a simple way in Photos or iCloud. What’s the easiest built-in method?
The annoying part is that iOS Photos still does not have a simple “select everything that is not favorited” button. You can bulk-select favorites, but there is no built-in non-favorites filter. So the trick is to temporarily move the favorites out of the way, delete what is left, then put the favorites back.
Option 1: hide your favorites first
This is usually the cleaner way because you are not messing around with recovery until the end.
- Open the Favorites album.
- Tap Select, then Select All.
- Tap the three dots and choose Hide. Your favorited photos move into Hidden and disappear from the normal library view.
- Go back to the main Library tab. At this point, what you see should be the non-favorites.
- Tap Select.
- Tap and hold the last photo in the library, then keep that finger down.
- With another finger, tap near the clock at the top of the screen. Photos should jump to the top and select everything between.
- Tap the trash icon and confirm.
- Go to the Hidden album, select everything there, and choose Unhide.
That puts the favorites back into the main library without making you tap through every photo one by one.
Option 2: use Recently Deleted as temporary storage
This also works, but you need to pay closer attention because Recently Deleted becomes part of the process.
- Empty Recently Deleted first so there is nothing mixed in there.
- Go to Favorites, select all, and delete them. They are not permanently gone yet. They are sitting in Recently Deleted.
- Go back to your main library and delete everything that remains.
- Open Recently Deleted and recover the favorites.
- After the favorites are recovered, whatever is still in Recently Deleted is the non-favorite stuff. Use Delete All to remove it permanently.
The risk with this one is recovering the wrong batch or forgetting what is currently in Recently Deleted. If that happens, you can basically undo the cleanup by accident.
If your storage does not free up right away
Deleting photos only moves them into Recently Deleted. The space usually will not come back until you clear that album too. After either method, go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted > Delete All. Restarting the phone afterward can help iOS refresh the storage number instead of showing the old amount for a while.
If Photos starts freezing
Large libraries can make this painful. Once you get into something like 20,000+ items, Photos may lag, crash, or fail during a huge delete. The drag-select gesture also gets less reliable when the selection is massive. If that happens, delete in chunks instead of trying to wipe the whole library in one pass. A few thousand at a time is usually less frustrating.
One more thing to check after deleting non-favorites
Getting rid of non-favorites helps, but the biggest storage hogs are often still things like long videos, 4K clips, screenshots, and burst photos where ten shots are nearly the same. If your phone is already low on space, iOS can slow down because it needs room for temp files and background tasks.
Clever Cleaner is useful for that leftover cleanup. It is free, has no ads, and does not require a subscription. The Heavies tab sorts files by size, so the huge videos show up first instead of being buried in the camera roll. The Similars tab groups near-duplicates and picks a Best Shot, which is handy for burst-style clutter. The Screenshots tab also shows the file size for each screenshot before you delete anything. It processes everything on-device, so nothing gets uploaded somewhere else.
Running Clever Cleaner after the favorites cleanup can recover more space than the manual Photos method by itself, especially if the real problem is a few giant videos or piles of similar shots.
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Check iCloud Photos before you delete anything, because this is not just “free up this iPhone” if syncing is on. Deleting non-favorites from the phone will delete them from iCloud and your other Apple devices too, so if you want an archive somewhere, export/download the full library first and then use the hide-favorites method Mike described.
If this is iPhone-only, you’re stuck with a workaround; if you have a Mac using the same iCloud Photos library, the cleaner built-in way is to use Photos on the Mac. Make a Smart Album for items where “favorite” is false, select everything in that album, and delete from there. That still deletes from iCloud everywhere if syncing is on, so @boswandelaar’s warning still applies, but it avoids the weird hide/recover dance on the phone. On the iPhone alone, there just isn’t a proper “delete all non-favorites” button.
