I have a large library of photos and videos, and I want to delete them all. The process is ridiculously slow. You apparently cannot delete more than 1,000 photos at a time. Even doing that, there is a long wait while Apple deletes and saves the changes.
I have turned off iCloud Photos on all my devices, but the photos are still in iCloud.
Yes, I recently experienced the same when I wanted to nuke 40 000 images from iCloud.
I first tried to delete them via Sequoia Photos.app but "Syncing..." remained on the Photos.app screen for hours even after an initial 100 image delete test.
Granted, just cancelling iCloud Photos might have also removed them after 30 days especially when I reduced iCloud from 2 TB to 200 GB for just iCloud Drive which works OK).
Anyway, I then decided to test if deleting from the upstream iCloud source is faster and went to the iCloud web site and deleted Photos there.
But it is possible to delete only in 1000 image batches and after each delete the user has to wait about 30-60 seconds for a "save". And the same happens also when completely deleting the images from "Recently Deleted" where also only 1000 batch is allowed and it also lasts about 30-60 seconds for each batch.
Maybe this is a safeguard preventing people doing a stupid thing to delete all images en masse which they will regret the next second...
Simpler Way to Delete Multiple Thousands of Photos & Videos?
