Or should I say auto-magically? Anyway, here is the solution to a problem all iOS users feel – there is no easy way to delete pictures on iPhone, except wiping the whole iOS clean.
We will be using Apple Shortcuts to remedy the situation.
In fact, all it takes it setting up an automation in Shortcuts.
Configure it like in this screenshot to check every day at any time selected by you for pictures within the last year, filter by date, call up x number of objects for deletion. (81 was the limit by the time this article was written.)
So, what’s going to happen now that this automation is active? Your automation will be triggered now every day and you will be asked whether you really want to delete the images or videos in your Photos collection.
And that’s the downside really, you cannot have the deletion happen silently in the background – you will be explicitly asked for permission. Every single time.
I hope Apple changes this, because that would finally allow for a decent lifecycle management. Think about it – you either backed up pictures already after a certain time or you do not really care about them, why have them stick around? In particular not on Apple devices where storage tends to be way more expensive than on any other given device. Of course you can set the intervals a lot less aggressively than I did and do not have to delete on a daily basis.
If you however have thousands of pictures sitting around, deleting the max number of pictures daily starts to make sense. It takes time, but is very little effort – and it will bring down the number of images and vids faster than you may think.
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