How to clean up photos on a USB drive or SSD from iPhone
Moving photos to a drive to free up your iPhone works… until the drive fills up with the same things: bursts, videos nobody will watch again, and copies of copies. You do not need a computer to clean it up. Since iPhone 15, with USB-C, the drive plugs straight in, and an iPhone with Lightning works too with an adapter.
1. What you need
- iPhone with USB-C (iPhone 15 and later): plug the flash drive or SSD into the charging port, directly or with a USB-C cable.
- iPhone with Lightning: you need Apple’s Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter.
- Spinning hard drives: they often need more power than the iPhone supplies. With USB-C, use a powered USB hub. With Lightning, plug the USB 3 adapter into a charger.
The drive must have a single partition and one of these formats: APFS, APFS (encrypted), macOS Extended (HFS+), exFAT, FAT32 or FAT.
If your drive uses NTFS, the usual Windows format, it is not on Apple's list. exFAT works on iPhone, Mac and Windows alike. Reformatting erases the whole drive, though, so copy its contents somewhere else first.
2. Open it in Files
Open the Files app, tap Browse, then tap the drive’s name below Locations. If you do not see Locations, tap Browse again.
From there you can open each photo or video, sort a folder by size, and delete what you do not want by touching and holding it.
Depending on the drive, what you delete may go to its Trash or disappear for good. If there is anything you cannot afford to lose, copy it somewhere else first.
3. Where Files falls short
Files is fine for moving things around, but not for going through thousands of photos:
- It shows file names and small thumbnails, not the photo full screen with its date and size.
- It sorts by size one folder at a time, not across the whole drive.
- It does not tell you which photos are near-identical or copies of another.
The shortcut: Limina
Limina is an app I made for cleaning up your library with a swipe, and it reads external drives too. In External disk you choose the drive, all of it or just one folder, and go through it with the same swipes: one way to keep, the other to delete.
- Photos: the oldest first.
- Videos: the longest first, which is where the gigabytes are.
- Similar: near-identical shots and copies of the same photo, grouped so you keep just one.
- Biggest files: photos and videos, the biggest first.
Before deleting, it tells you where things will go: to the drive’s Trash or, if the drive has none, that they cannot be recovered. If you unplug it halfway, everything you marked stays marked. And Forget Disk only makes Limina stop reading it: nothing on the drive is deleted.
It all happens on your iPhone or iPad: no account and nothing uploaded anywhere. The external disk is part of Limina Pro.