Unable to delete photos (iPhone 14 Plus), Transfer photos from iCloud to Google Photos

My mom's iPhone 14 Plus is full of storage and will not allow us to delete photos. We are trying to delete some photo's as that's mostly what it is full of. When trying to delete, the picture pops right back into the library to where it was. I know normally you have to go to recently deleted and delete from there as well, but these photos do not even go to 'recently deleted". I checked and about a quarter of the photos are in her iCloud (we also use Google Photos), so how can we move the photos from iCloud to Google Photos easily and why will the phone not allow us to delete photos. We have restarted it, signed out and signed back in. She has 127/128gb full. I need help with how to get some photos off of this phone. Thank you. KA

iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 18

Posted on Oct 25, 2025 3:56 PM

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5 replies

Oct 26, 2025 6:56 AM in response to troyal147

These pictures may have been transferred from a computer. Pictures that are transferred through a cable from a computer, perhaps with iTunes, can be shown by Photos, but they're not "owned" by Photos. So these pictures can't be edited or deleted by Photos, and they can't be synchronized by iCloud Photos The typically don't even show a trash can. The idea is that they are kept on the computer and transferred to the phone temporarily. One way to delete them is to use the computer to transfer an empty set of "pictures" to the phone, and the empty set will replace the others. In using iTunes for this, it may give the option to deselect the pictures that are already there. If you have a Mac, then you may be able to do it with the app Image Capture in your Applications folder. 


Another way to get rid of all the non-deletable pictures is to momentarily turn on iCloud Photos. You get a scary warning that these will be deleted. When you say OK, then they're trashed, and then Photos will start to transfer the other pictures to iCloud.But you can turn off iCloud and stop the sync before it happens.


If you want to save some of these non-deletable pictures, then you can use "Share" to save them to Files. Then re-import them from Files to create fully useable versions.

Oct 26, 2025 10:41 AM in response to troyal147

troyal147 wrote: …Not sure why it won’t let her delete other than her phone is full.

There you go! If there's not enough free storage, then even deleting pictures becomes impossible. You should have at least 10% free storage. You'll need to delete some little stuff before you can get to deleting larger files. You can't really depend on anything working right until you get enough free storage for the system to follow an app's instructions.

Oct 26, 2025 9:50 AM in response to Richard.Taylor

So, none of the photos were transferred through cable. My new question is. Is if I turn off synch for iCloud, when the photos are deleted off of the phone they are still in the cloud (laptop) correct? So could I do that have her delete some photos then out the ones ahead want back so they can go to google photos instead of iCloud. Not sure why it won’t let her delete other than her phone is full. No wires for anything, my laptop wont recognize her iPhone at the moment.


kellissia

Unable to delete photos (iPhone 14 Plus), Transfer photos from iCloud to Google Photos

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