I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max with about 8,000 photos stored on the phone.
I want to delete some of them, however about a 1,000 the trash icon is greyed out.
Photos are not synched with iCloud and never have been.
I believe the 1,000 photos in question may have been synched 6 or 7 years ago using the old iTunes.
How can I delete these photos without compromising the other 7,000 photos.
Danny
iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18
Pictures that are transferred through a cable from a computer can be shown by Photos, but they're not "owned" by Photos. So these pictures can't be edited or deleted by Photos. The idea is that they are kept on the computer and transferred to the phone temporarily. One way to delete them is to use the computer to transfer an empty set of "pictures" to the phone, and the empty set will replace the others. In using iTunes for this, it may give the option to deselect the pictures that are already there. If you have a Mac, then you may be able to use the app Image Capture to do this.
Another way to get rid of all the non-deletable pictures is to momentarily turn on iCloud Photos. You get a scary warning that these will be deleted. When you say OK, then they're trashed, Photos will start to transfer the other pictures to iCloud, but you can turn off iCloud and stop that before much happens.
If you want to save some of these non-deletable pictures, then you can use "Share" to save them to Files. Then re-import them from Files to create fully useable versions.
Does this work for you?
Cannot delete photos from iPhone
