Learn how to delete albums you no longer need in Apple Photos on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac to clean up and organize your image library.
Maybe you’ve created dedicated Photos albums to hold images you no longer need, unneeded screenshots, or old wallpapers.
Deleting albums you no longer need is one way to clean up your library. Don’t worry, deleting an album doesn’t remove any images and videos inside it from your library.
With iCloud Photos set up, deleting an album on one device removes it from all your others. Deleted albums are removed immediately instead of moving to the “Recently Deleted” section. As a result, you can’t recover them, unlike being able to recover deleted images and videos.
iPhone and iPad
- Open the iOS Photos app.
- Scroll down the Collections tab to the Albums section. Tap the little arrow next to it if the albums view is minimized.
- Touch and hold an album in the list, then choose Delete Album.
Or, open an album, tap the three-dotted menu icon at the top, and select Delete Album.
You must delete albums individually as the Photos app doesn’t support selecting multiple albums. But if you use iCloud Photos, you can delete multiple albums at once on your Mac, and they’ll be removed from your iPhone and iPad, too.
Mac
Unlike Photos for iPhone and iPad, the Mac version lets you delete multiple albums.
To delete a single album, right-click it underneath the Albums section in the sidebar and select Delete Album.
To delete multiple albums at once, expand the Albums section in the sidebar. Now hold the Command key while clicking the albums you’d like to delete, then right-click the selection and choose Delete N Items.
If you have many outdated albums in Photos you never use, it’s probably high time you remove them to streamline your library.
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