Breakups are hard, and it doesn’t help when your iPhone keeps showing you photos of your ex. If you’re done with this person and want them off your iPhone entirely, you can quickly delete just their photos. We’ve also found ways to hide their photos from repeatedly appearing in various iPhone widgets. These methods may help you stop your iPhone from opening up old wounds all over again.
Delete all photos of your ex
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Your iPhone allows you to delete all photos of your ex-partner, as a recent Reddit thread points out. If you want to remove all of their pictures, open the Photos app on your iPhone and go to the Albums tab. Tap any thumbnail in the People & Pets section and select your ex-partner’s face. You can now tap the Review button in the top-right corner, and remove any faces that are not your ex. Once you’ve done this, go to the previous page, tap Select and select all photos on this page. Press the trash icon in the bottom-right corner and delete all of these photos.
To permanently get rid of these photos, you can go to the Albums tab in the Photos app, open the Recently Deleted album, and delete all photos from here. If you remove photos from Recently Deleted, you will not be able to bring them back.
Download photos for a backup
You can save a copy of all of your ex’s photos if you wish to retain a backup. To do this, open iCloud.com on your Mac or PC, and log in with your Apple ID and password. Select Photos on this page, go to the Recently Deleted album, and download all these photos. This lets you store a backup, which you can save to an external hard drive or a cloud storage service.
Note that this method will not work if you’ve disabled iCloud backup for your iPhone’s photos.
Stop them from appearing in slideshows
If you aren’t ready to delete photos of your ex, you can take a less nuclear approach and just stop your iPhone from showing them in your “Memories” slideshows. This feature is great when you want to be reminded of good memories, but it can be triggering if it shows unpleasant memories. To hide your ex from the Memories feature, open the Photos app on your iPhone and visit the For You tab. Tap and hold any photo of your ex (or hit the three-dots icon in the top-right corner of the thumbnail), and select Feature a person less. Select your ex, tap Never Feature This Person, and hit Continue. You can also select any memories of your ex in the For You tab and pick Remove from Featured Photos to delete specific memories.
Hide their photos without deleting them
You also have an option to hide someone from your photo library by moving their photos to the hidden album on your iPhone. To do this, open the Photos app and go to Albums > People & Pets. Select your ex-partner, tap the Select button in the top-right corner, and select all of their photos. Then, tap the three-dots icon in the bottom-right corner and select Hide. This will move all their photos to the Hidden album in the Photos app. You can access this anytime by going to the Albums tab and selecting Hidden.