Gary, I have been trying to clean up my photo collection on my iPad. I had been doing a sync with iTunes to my iMac where the main library is. That collection is around 30,000 images. I decided I wanted to do the sync with just some albums. So, I did a sync, checked selected albums and just a few people. After the sync, nothing changed. I had the same number of images and an album with “people from my Mac”. I have iOS 10.3.3 and OS X 10.12.6. The iPad is not at capacity with 15 GB free of 128GB. However, I would like to reduce the number of photos. How do I go about the sync?
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Mike
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How Do I Clean Up Photos On iPad?
Comments: 4 Responses to “How Do I Clean Up Photos On iPad?”
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So you are syncing from your iMac to your iPad? Using iTunes? And you are NOT using iCloud Photo Library? (Check that).
First, do you take photos with your iPad? Or are all of the photos on your iPad ones synced from your Mac? If you take photos with your iPad, have you synced them all TO your iMac in the Photos app? And then removed those from your iPad when doing so?
When syncing to your iPad, what settings are you using, exactly? It sounds like if you are checking "a few people" and people show up on your iPad, then it is working correctly. If not, then can you identify what photos are there that you think should not be there?
I don't use iCloud Photo Library. Yes, I do take photos or sync some from other devices using PhotoSync. I have imported all of those to the iMac and deleted them from the iPad. When I sync, I select just some albums. As well, of about 40 people, I've decided to sync only immediate family, so only five names are selected. After these selections I should have around 10,000 images. Instead, I have many people I didn't select as well as all the photos from the iMac. Overall, the same as before.
To fix problems like these, you really need to troubleshoot and try things. What I would try next is to select nothing at all and sync that. See what is left over when you do that. Should be 0 photos. If not, try syncing a test album with exactly one photo in it. See if that works.
If you end up with some photos anyway, then try deleting them on the iPad. Does it give you a message when you try to do so, or let you delete them? Perhaps those photos are there via some previous syncing method and that's why they remain. Then you should be able to delete them.
I think I've discovered the source of the problem. I disposed of an older MBP and bought a new iMac. I can't recall how I setup Photos on the iMac (the source of the images). However, I did start using the iMac as my device to sync the iPad. So, in my non-technical interpretation, the iPad keeps the older images from the MBP. I should have done a final sync to "No Photos" before switching to the iMac to sync. Just my best guess.