How To Delete Albums From My Iphone

Here's the best way to quickly delete photo albums on iPhone!

Wondering how to delete albums on iPhone? Read on!

The iPhone is the most popular camera in the world. But its hardware needs to share the reason for that popularity with the software as well. As part of iOS, there has always been the Photos app.

The Photos app goes all the way back to the original iPhone. And with the Photos app came a dedicated place on the iPhone to save, browse, and organize your photos. The organization feature includes soffits your photos into various albums – like Vacation 2021, Christmas 2015, and Fido's First Birthday.

But what happens if you want to delete an entire photo album? How do you do it?

Thankfully, it's not that hard, and we'll show you how to do so below.

Deleting photo albums is relatively similar no matter which recent iOS you have installed. These instructions are for iOS 14, but they should be nearly identical to what you do on iOS 13 and the upcoming iOS 15.

How To Delete Albums On iPhone – The FAST Way — Credit: Apple

Deleting Photo Albums On iPhone: Tips

Keep in mind that deleting photos albums doesn't delete the pictures inside them. Also, there are some albums you can't delete. Here's what you need to know:

When you create a photo album and select photos to put inside it, you actually aren't moving those photos from your main Photos Library or copying a new copy of the photo to the album you are placing it in.

When you "place" a photo in an album, all you are really doing is putting a graphics shortcut (a representation of the photo) in the album. When you tap on it, it opens up the photo from the main library, where the real photo always lives.

The above is why when you remove a photo from an album, it is not deleted from your phone.

This means that if you choose to delete an entire photo album, you are not deleting the photos it contains themselves. You are only deleting their organizational structure (the album). The original photos will still reside in your Photos Library.

Also, note that there are some albums you cannot delete. These are the default albums like Recents, Selfies, Screenshots, etc.

Got all that? Good! Now it's time to move on to deleting photo albums.

How To Delete Albums On iPhone

The good news is deleting a photo album on iPhone is very easy. We'll walk you through it right now:

Tap the Photos app to open it.
Tap the Albums tab at the bottom of the screen.
Tap the "See All" button. This will take you to the "My Albums" screen. This screen shows you all the photo albums you have made.
Tap the "Edit" button. You'll notice a red dot with a minus sign in it appear in the upper left corner of any photo album you can delete.
Scroll through the list of your photo albums and when you find on your want to delete, tap the red dot with the menu sign in it.
A message will pop up saying, "Delete [album name]." It will go on to say, "Are you sure you want to delete the album [album name]? The photos will not be deleted." If you want to continue with deleting this album, tap the red "Delete Album" button.

And that's it! You've now deleted a photo album on iPhone!

You can continue to delete other albums by following the steps above or you can tap the "Done" button to exit delete album mode.

Michael Grothaus

Apple expert and novelist, Michael Grothaus has been covering tech on KnowYourMobile for the best part of 10 years. Prior to this, he worked at Apple. And before that, he was a film journalist. Michael is a published author; his book Epiphany Jones was voted as one of the best novels about Hollywood by Entertainment Weekly. Michael is also a writer at other publications including VICE and Fast Company.