One thing I wish iPhoto allowed users is the ability to delete photos from iDevices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) before they are imported. Thankfully, the Preview program on the Mac can accomplish this task, making it a useful tool to manage photos on the iDevice before they are imported into iPhoto. To be fair, you can choose to delete photos from your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch before you import them into iPhoto, but often it requires you to delete them individually because the photo thumbnails are so small.

Understanding Preview

Preview is one of the most versatile tools you have on your Mac. It is the reason you typically don’t need to install Adobe Reader. Preview lets you set up scanners and printers quickly and easily, and it lets you open a variety of picture types. Now you can add “deleting photos from your iPhone before they are imported to you computer” to the mix. The process is pretty straightforward.

Getting Things Going

First things first. Connect your iDevice to your computer. Don’t worry if iPhoto starts up when you plug in your product since we’re not interested in iPhoto for now.

Open up Preview from your applications folder and go to File in the menu bar and choose “Import from [the name of your device]…” from the list. You’ll get a window similar to this.

From here you can highlight the photos you don’t want and click on the red delete icon in the toolbar towards the bottom of the window. If you don’t care for all the extra information that Preview provides in the list (aperture, depth, focal length, etc.) click on the four squares at the bottom left corner to change from list view to icon view. Now the only thing you’ll see is the photo and the name of the file. You can also increase or decrease the size of the image thumbnail by clicking and dragging the slider at the bottom right corner of the window. You can also opt to have your photos imported to a non iPhoto location on your Mac by clicking to the right of “Import To:” in the toolbar and choosing a different location.

That’s all there is to it. Now you can delete pictures from your devices before importing them into iPhoto. Have you found any secrets buried in Preview? Let us know in the comments.