ios 9 Quick Tips | 2 New Ways to Select Multiple Photos for Batch Edits in ios 9

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I just discovered that Apple has finally reprized a method to select multiple photos all at once in ios 9. So you can now perform batch tasks with groups of photos. You can do things like like deleting the whole group, or you can open them all in a different app, or you can share them all through social media, messaging or emailing…but as a group rather than individually.

This is a feature many people have been requesting for eons! This capability was briefly present in ios 6 but no one really seemed to know it existed! I discovered it accidentally right around the time ios 7 was released, so I only got to use it a few times. Once again I discovered this feature by accident while working with a large number of vacation photos.

My advice to anyone who may have been postponing organizing all those photos they’ve accumulated is to do it now while these multi-selection features are available! Especially if you have thousands of photos (like I do)…now is a great time to accomplish a mass reorganization…because there’s no guarantee that this feature won’t disappear again!

Apple’s Photo App Icon

Option 1: How to Select Multiple Photos Using ‘Album View’ with the Apple photo app (ios 9 only)

Identify the range of contiguous photos that you’ll want to select and then act upon.
Tap on Select while in Album view.
Instead of just tapping to select each individual photo, long press the first photo in the range, then, without lifting your finger, drag it up…row by row…until you’ve selected all the photos you want.(you’re really select whole rows of photos but the first and last row can be partials.) You can tell a photo is selected by the blue check-mark that appears in the top right-hand corner of the thumbnail.
Tap on the Share icon (the rectangle with upward pointing arrow) for most ‘open in’ and ‘sharing’ actions or the trashbin icon to delete them.