FoneTool Help Documents

Easily Fix Photos Cannot Be Deleted Issue

Photos Cannot Be Deleted?

You may find you can't delete or edit photos on your iOS devices after successfully transferred through FoneTool by "PC to iPhone" function. Why is that and how to solve the issue?

Why They Cannot Be Deleted?

FoneTool offers two ways to transfer photos to your iPhone: the first way is to transfer photos from your PC to your iPhone with the help of the FoneTool App, after the transfer is complete, these photos can be deleted and edited on your iPhone. The second way is to transfer photos directly to your iPhone, this way does not require the installation of FoneTool App, but the photos cannot be deleted or edited on your iPhone. The second method is similar to the iTunes "Sync Photos" function. If you have used this function, you will find that the photos synced to iPhone by iTunes cannot be deleted or edited on your phone either.

Photos transferred to iPhone in the second way can be found in the "From My Mac" category in "Photos" app, stored in the FoneTool album. Photos transferred via other third party software may also be stored under the "From My Mac" category, e.g. Album A, Album B. All photos in albums under the "From My Mac" category cannot be deleted or edited on your iPhone.  

How To Delete These Photos?

When we cannot delete photos on the phone, we can indirectly erase them with the iTunes "Sync Photos" function, but this function will erase all albums and photos in the "From My Mac" category, so if some of the photos are important to you, we recommend that you use "Selective Backup" or "iPhone to PC" function in FoneTool to save these photos to your PC first, and then clear photos on your iPhone via iTunes. Finally, restore or transfer those photos saved to the PC back to your iPhone.    

Step 1: Create an empty folder on the PC.

Step 2: Connect your iPhone to the PC via a USB cable.

Step 3: Run iTunes, you can see the connected iPhone, click the iPhone icon to enter the iPhone data management page.

Step 4: Select "Photos", check "Sync Photos", then select the empty folder created at Step 1 as source, and finally click "Apply".   

Step 5: When the sync is complete, all photos in the "From My Mac" category will be cleared from "Photos" app on your iPhone.

Note: If iCloud Photo Sync is on, then iTunes Photo Sync is not available, so you need to turn off iCloud Photo Sync first if you want to use this method to delete photos.