Deleting all but favorite photos and videos on the iPhone

Solution 1:

A user on the MacRumors forum has built an app to do exactly this task, find and delete all photos in a folder or in the camera roll that have not been marked as a favorite.

The app is "Deleter" by saleksandras and it's at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deleter/id1180101544?ls=1&mt=8

I just ran the app, and it worked perfectly! It selected the 2,600 photos on my phone that I hadn't marked as favorites and ignored the 600 that I had favorited. When I hit delete, it moved all of the non-favorites from my camera roll to the recently deleted folder (so I could recover them for 30 days if I needed to). It took a minute or so to delete everything, but it was 9gb of photos, so I think it can be excused for that :)

It was a bit nerve-wracking to hit delete on that many photos, but I had already backed up my camera roll to my PC using the PhotoSync app (another great tool), so I wasn't really worried.

I don't know why Apple doesn't include a mass-selection tool to easily select all favorite or non-favorite photos, but this app does the job!

Solution 2:

I know this is old, but I’ve just found a good way to do this.

  1. Go into Favourites folder, and select them all.
  2. Click “duplicate”. This will create duplicates, all of which will then appear at the end of your Camera roll.
  3. Select all the files before the duplicate copies on camera roll and delete them.