Managing Photos in Albums... a Clarification

[NoBite]

In my previous thread, we affirmed that photos in albums beneath the Camera Roll are really in the Camera Roll and only pointed to in the other folders. Thus, deleting the photos in the Camera Roll necessarily deletes the same photos in the other folders. There are third-party apps that act differently.

Upon reflection, I'd like to state my question differently and more accurately. Let's say you have 1,000 photos in your Camera Roll and 250 of those photos have been designated as Favorites and are in your Favorites Folder. You've got all your photos backed up elsewhere. You'd like to purge your phone of all stored photos except for the 250 in your Favorites Folder. What is the easiest way to do this?

 

[J. A.]

The easiest way to delete all the photos, would be to go to the Photos tab, and choose "Select" at the top right:

Then tap "Select" at the right, next to the images:

You'll have to scroll through the whole collection to choose every "Select" you find there.
That done for every day that shows up on the tab, select the Trash icon:

This will delete all of your photos, including your Favorites. If you remember them well, go to "Recently Deleted" in the Albums tab, and recover them afterwards. That done, remove the other pictures.

Otherwise you'll have to look at them one by one, to make sure you don't remove one of your favorites, and delete them one by one.

 

[NoBite]

Thank you for your suggestion. Your suggestion, in summary, is to trash ALL the photos. Then, go to the Recently Deleted folder and by using my memory of which 250 of the 1,000 photos were in my Favorites, recover those 250. Well, that is my fall-back, the worst case scenario!

What would be handy, Apple, would be an indicator on the photos that are in my Favorites, or any other Folder, visible when I open the Camera Roll. Thereby, I could one-by-one simply delete the unmarked photos from the Camera Roll. That would be my second choice.

First choice, allow photos in sub-folders to remain in the sub-folders unless deleted from those folders specifically, regardless of whether the photo was deleted from the Camera Roll.

I wonder if additional photo management tools will come along from Apple in the future?

(PS - my entire thread came about because I didn't understand how the photos were hosted within folders/Camera Roll. At one time I had a couple thousand photos in the Camera Roll and a couple hundred Favorites. I wanted to clean up the Camera Roll as all the pictures were already saved elsewhere, but I did like to look at and share my Favorites occasionally. So, thinking the two folders were completely independent, I whacked most all of the Camera Roll photos, only to discover that my Favorites had now shrunk to about 25! Yes, I could go to the master depository of all my photos and try to find the Favorites. But, now that means looking through roughly 15,000 photos over many years. Probably not something I'm going to find time for soon. So, in the spirit of closing the gate after the cows are out, I posted these threads. )

 

[J. A.]

Your first choice doesn't work. Maybe Apple will change that in the future. Who knows?

So you'll have to use a variant of your second choice.
When you look at your images this way, you can't see which ones are marked as favorites:

You'll have to open them one by one:

 

[NoBite]

I appreciate your considerate reply.

However, I have a computer and mobile computing devices to save me from the drudgery and tedium of such a manual, time-intensive endeavor. Yes, I have known about opening each picture and looking for the heart as long as I have known about the concept of Favorite pictures! The goal is for a practical alternative. Although your suggestion is a solution, it is not the common sense "it just works" type of solution Apple should be proud of. Apparently, at this time, the feature I seek is a figment of too few imaginations.