How to delete google photos without deleting from iphone / cloud

I just realized all my photos from my iphone are on google photos (which I never used voluntarily). Google will not allow me to just delete my photos from google, it insists on deleting on all devices and cloud. I stopped syncing/backup and have tried everything to delete but the delete button will NOT work on the web. I even downloaded the google photos app but when I delete, it says it will delete it everywhere. I feel like I'm being held hostage - how do I get this done???

iPhone 13 Pro Max, iOS 16

Posted on Aug 3, 2024 01:35 PM

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8 replies

Aug 5, 2024 09:20 PM in response to E_barn

I figured it out!!!!!!!!!!! So what you want to do is make sure that your backup is turned off in google photos, then if you go on to the google photos app on your phone and select all of the pictures (you can do this by holding down on one picture, then dragging your finger to the bottom of your screen to automatically make the screen go down and select at the same time if you know what I mean - and you can use another finger to scroll the screen faster too while holding the other one down at the bottom of the screen) and delete them all!! even if it asks for you to delete them from your device, DELETE THEM! Then sign out of the google photos app and delete that son-of-a-gun. Then go into your regular photos app on your phone -> trash -> then recover all your photos and they won't upload back onto google photos!! I tried this and it worked for me!! I also double checked it didn't redownload them by downloading the google photos app again and I didn't give the app permission to download my photos and it worked!!!! AND my gmail doesn't give me the "your storage is full" notification anymore.

Aug 7, 2024 07:12 AM in response to E_barn

So I came in here looking for this exact answer because I stopped getting email due to my google photos being full. What I did was I turned off the back up (like mentioned below) and then I went into setting and turned off google photo access to my iphone photos. I then deleted the app and went into google photos to delete the photos that were in there to free up storage. I tested a few photos first to see if they would end up in my icloud and iphoto trash as well under recently deleted and I didn't see that happening OR see my photo numbers dropping down due to deleting from google photos. I'm going to leave them in my recently deleted for a few more days just to make sure things are fine on my phone photos and in my icloud, but so far so good.

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How to delete google photos without deleting from iphone / cloud

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