clear iOS camera roll with Pythonista
Sometimes I find the need to clear the camera roll on my iPhone after I have backed up to free up the storage. Interestingly Apple doesn’t offer a simple way to do it and it would become a drag if I need to select all the photos by tapping on each of them.
There appears to be few ways to achieve this. One approach requires connect iPhone to computer which I rarely do if never.
Another approach requires using 3rd party app like Gemini Photos which seems
to be ok.
However given I have purchased a fantastic app Pythonista 3 and I like using python, so I figured if I can achieve this with the app.
And answer is a sure yes.
Pythonista photos module
Pythonista provides a module called photos which can be used to do a LOT
of things to your photos on your ios device.
Before we diving into the final code, I would like to explain few concepts involved really quick to help understand the code.
AssetCollection is the corresponding python type for a photo album. It holds
a list of Asset object which contains two pieces information: metadata and image data
for a photo.
clear the camera roll
photos module provides get_albums and get_smart_albums method to retrieve
an photo album which is AssetCollection object as aforementioned.
Since I want to clear the Camera Roll and only get_smart_albums return would
include it, so we will be using it to begin with.
Next step is straightforward, get the Camera Roll from return result of get_smart_albums
by checking the title of an album.
After that we can just delete all the photos from the album by invoking photos.batch_delete().
That method requires a list of Asset object and AssetCollection.assets property is what we need.
That’s it!
Here’s all the code:
import photos # NOTE: return of this will not include camera roll # a = photos.get_albums() # return of this will include camera roll albums = photos.get_smart_albums() camera_roll = [a for a in albums if a.title == 'Camera Roll'][0] photos.batch_delete(camera_roll.assets) # NOTE: this will not work! see photos module documentation #camera_roll.remove_assets(camera_roll.assets)
action
After you run the script, iOS will popup a confirmation dialog before it actually deletes all the photos.
Once you tap Delete button, all photos are gone.
I figure it’s nice and easy enough for me, if you own the Pythonista already,
it might be worth a try.
This is tested with my iPhone6 (running iOS 11.3).
photos module provides much more functionality than this, you can explore
its documentation to find out other use cases.
