You try to take one photo, but you hold the shutter button down for just a split second too long. Suddenly, your iPhone makes a machine-gun sound and you have just captured 45 identical pictures. This is Burst Mode.
Burst Mode is fantastic for capturing action shots, like a child jumping into a pool, but it is terrible for your storage. Here is how to find these massive photo stacks and cleanly delete the bad ones.
Step 1: Find All Your Bursts
You do not need to scroll through your entire camera roll looking for a tiny "Burst" icon. iOS automatically groups them into one specific album.
- Open the Photos app.
- Tap Albums at the bottom of the screen.
- Scroll down to the Media Types section.
- Tap Bursts.
This folder contains every burst you have ever taken. Even though a thumbnail looks like a single photo, it could contain 100 hidden images behind it.
Step 2: Pick the Best Shot
Now that you have found them, you need to extract the good photos and discard the rest.
- Tap on a Burst photo to open it.
- Tap Select... at the bottom of the screen.
- You will see a film strip of all the shots in the sequence. Swipe left and right to review them.
- Apple's AI usually places a small grey dot under the photos it thinks are the best (where the subject is in focus and nobody is blinking).
- Tap the circle in the bottom right corner of any photo you want to keep. A blue checkmark will appear. (You can select more than one if you want).
- Tap Done in the top right corner.
Step 3: The Magic Deletion Pop-Up
As soon as you tap Done, your iPhone will ask you a crucial question: Keep Everything or Keep Only 1 Favorite (or however many you selected).
Tap Keep Only 1 Favorite.
This instantly deletes the other 44 useless shots in the sequence. The burst is disassembled, your favorite shot remains in your camera roll as a normal photo, and you just freed up a large chunk of storage space.
Note: Remember to empty your "Recently Deleted" folder if you need that storage space immediately.
How to Prevent Accidental Bursts
On modern iPhones, simply holding the shutter button takes a quick video, rather than a burst. To take a burst deliberately, you have to press the shutter button and drag it to the left.
However, if you use the volume buttons on the side of your phone to take photos, holding the Volume Up button will trigger a burst. If you do this accidentally all the time, you can turn it off:
- Go to Settings > Camera.
- Toggle off Use Volume Up for Burst.
A Faster Way to Manage Photo Clutter
If you have thousands of normal photos to sort through in addition to your bursts, manual deletion is exhausting. Use Swipe Photo Cleaner. It turns the tedious chore of reviewing photos into a fast, gamified experience. Just swipe left to trash the bad shots and right to keep the good ones, making it the easiest way to organize a massive camera roll.