How To Delete All Google Photos

DELETING YOUR PHOTOS FROM GOOGLE PHOTOS

Removing your photos from Google’s prying AI isn’t a difficult task but you may want to perform a few pre-steps to ensure everything goes smoothly the first time. You can begin by backing up everything you don’t want to permanently lose.

SAVE WHAT NEEDS SAVING

You can easily backup anything as Google allows you to grab large groups and even albums of photos at a time. All of which will be compressed down into a nice, tiny .zip file for easy storage. If you’re hoping to save all of your photos, it’d probably be easier to send them all to a folder in Google Drive and then download them to your PC from there. Remember that Google Photos is likely synced up to your mobile device, so any photos deleted in Google Photos will also be deleted from your device.

BEST WAY IN WHICH TO DELETE YOUR PHOTOS

Should you only need to delete a few hundred or fewer photos, you should do so directly in Google Photos. As previously stated, Google Photos allows you to select groups of photos or whole albums for deletion. But if you want to save everything to your PC or mobile device without Google Photos synced up, you should create a folder in Google Drive to store the photos in for downloading and deletion.

DESKTOP

1. Open up Google Drive and login to the account you want your photos sent to.
2. Click the gear located in the upper-right corner and open Settings.
3. While in Settings, scroll to find “Create a Google Photos folder” and put a checkmark in the box.

MOBILE DEVICE

1. In Google Photos, open to your account panel by clicking the three vertical bars in the upper-left corner.
2. Tap on the gear icon to open Settings.
3. Locate “Auto Add” inside Google Photos and switch it on.

A folder will now be created in Google Drive for your Google Photos. At this point, you can delete all of the sub-folders individually or the primary folder to delete everything. When you go to delete the folder, Google will prompt you with a confirmation dialog explaining that this will delete them from Google Photos as well as any synced devices.

You should also turn off the “Back up and sync” feature in Google Photos on your mobile device. This will make it so that your photos taken with your mobile device will no longer sync back to Google Photos.

REMOVING PHOTOS FROM MOBILE DEVICE

For those who aren’t as disturbed by Google’s snooping, you may want to only remove all photos from your device and not Google Photos. This will allow you to free up room on your phone while still keeping all of your photos safe and sound, backed up to Google Photos. There are a few ways to go about this:

Option 1 – Launch Google Photos on your phone and select a photo for removal. Then tap the triple dots icon toward the top to open the menu. Then just choose Delete from device, and that photo will be removed from your phone but not Google Photos.

Option 2 – Head to Settings in Google Photos and choose Free up device storage. This will let you know that the photos have been backed up to Google Photos and you can tap on Remove to rid your device of all the photos.

Option 3 – This is the typical removal option. Just open your Photos Gallery and move all photos to the trash bin. You can delete multiples in this way as well.