How to remove photos from the gallery on Xiaomi: the complete guide

Xiaomi smartphone owners know how fast internal storage fills up. High-quality camera optics allow you to take pictures with detail that takes up a significant amount of memory. Sooner or later, each user faces the need to make room by removing unnecessary images.

The process of cleaning the gallery on devices with a shell MIUI or HyperOS has its own peculiarities. Standard methods may differ from the usual functionality of pure Android. In this article, we will discuss in detail all ways to delete files, including hidden functions and work with cloud services.

Incorrectly deleting or ignoring some system folders can leave space unfilled and photos in your memory. Understanding the structure of the Android file system will help you manage your media library effectively.

Basic removal of single photos and series

The easiest way to get rid of a bad picture is to use the standard interface of the Gallery app, and when you open the image in full screen, you will see a toolbar at the bottom of the display, and you just need to click on the basket icon to delete one file.

But when you're talking about tens or hundreds of images, piece-by-piece removal becomes ineffective, so you have to go into highlight mode, and you have to hold your finger on one of the thumbnails, and then you activate multiple-choice mode, and the system will tell you to mark all the objects you need to remove.

The MIUI shell allows you to speed up this process with the "Select All" function, which is especially true when cleaning a series or screenshots. After selecting a group of files, press the delete button and the system will request confirmation of action.

• 📸 Finger highlighting allows you to select specific shots from different albums.
• 🗑️ The “Select All” button instantly tags all content in the current folder.
• 📅 Sorting by date helps you quickly find old series to remove.

⚠️ Note: When you delete a large number of photos, make sure you don’t check important documents or screenshots with passwords that are often lost in personal photos.

It's worth noting that once you press the delete button, the files don't disappear permanently, but they move to a special buffer, which we'll discuss below, which is a security mechanism that prevents accidental data loss.

Working with the basket and restoring the remote

Deleted photos on Xiaomi smartphones are defaulted to the folder “Recently deleted” – this analog of the computer basket stores files for 30 days, and only after this period, the system automatically clears the space occupied by this data.

If your goal is to free up disk space immediately, normal deletion is not enough. You need to manually clear the cart. To do this, go to the Albums section and scroll down to the "Recently Deleted" item, where you can delete files permanently or restore them in case of an error.

The recovery function works flawlessly if the storage period has not expired, just select the right thumbnails and press the Restore button. The files will return to their original albums. This is convenient if you rushed to clean up.

It's important to understand that the contents of the shopping cart also take up space in the "Other" section or directly in memory if synchronization is enabled. Completely cleaning this partition is the fastest way to get a few gigabytes of free space.

Delete photos through the file manager

Sometimes the built-in gallery doesn't display all the files, especially the system thumbnails or images uploaded by messengers. In such cases, a standard Explorer comes to the rescue. On Xiaomi, it's called Explorer and has a yellow icon.

For deep cleaning, you need to go the way Internal Drive → DCIM → Camera. This is where the original images taken on the main camera are stored. By removing files from here, you are guaranteed to free up space bypassing the gallery cache.

Also worth checking is the Pictures folder, which often stores screenshots, social media images, and edited versions of a photo, and deleting from here affects files that may not appear in the main gallery stream.

Using a file manager gives you more control over the data structure, you see the real weight of the folders, and you can delete video files, which often take up the most space, but are lost in the general gallery list.

Sync with Mi Cloud and Google Photos

Many users forget that their smartphone is synced to cloud services. If you have Mi Cloud or Google Photos enabled, deleting a picture on your phone can cause it to be removed from the cloud, and vice versa.

Before a mass cleaning, make sure to check your sync settings. If you want to make room on your phone but save your photo in the cloud, use the Free Space feature in the Google Photos app, which will delete local copies by leaving the originals on the Internet.

In the case of Mi Cloud, it's more complicated. Deleting a photo from the gallery when sync is enabled will delete it everywhere. To break that connection, you either have to turn off sync in your account settings or move the files to a hidden album before you delete it.

It's important to distinguish between backup and synchronization. A backup is an archive that can be restored. Synchronization is a mirror image of the state of a device in the cloud in real time.

Cleaning Hidden Albums and System Garbage

Xiaomi has a Hidden Album feature, where users often hide sensitive photos, and if you forget about them, you can lose access to important files or, conversely, leave extra files on the device, you need to swipe down in the album viewing mode and enter a password.

In addition to custom albums, there are system thumbnails that take up space. The.thumbnails folder inside the DCIM can grow to several gigabytes. These are cache files that speed up the display of tape. They can be safely deleted through the file manager.

Also worth noting are messenger folders: WhatsApp, Telegram and Viber create their own galleries inside the phone's memory, and images received in chat rooms are often duplicated and clog the main gallery.

• 🔒 Hidden album protected by a separate password or fingerprint.
• 🧹 The.thumbnails folder is automatically cleaned, but you can manually clean it.
• 💬 Media from messengers is better to clean through the settings of the applications themselves.

Regularly checking these hidden places helps keep order. System debris is not dangerous to the OS, but its accumulation slows down the interface and the opening of heavy albums.

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Use the built-in Security -> Cleanup app to automatically search for duplicates of similar photos and blurred shots.

Problems with removal and their solution

Sometimes users are faced with a situation where the photo is not deleted or immediately returned to the gallery, this can be caused by third-party applications that block the file, or file system errors.

A common cause is active synchronization in the background, so if you delete a photo and the cloud service immediately restores it, you have to temporarily shut down the Internet or the sync itself, and the problem can be in access rights.

If the file is corrupted, the system may not properly process the deletion request, in which case it will help to reboot the device, and if that does not help, try renaming the file through the Explorer and delete it again.

⚠️ Note: If the system writes “File is busy” or “Not enough rights”, do not try to delete system files from the root folders of Android, this may disrupt the interface.

In rare cases, cleaning the cache of the Gallery app itself helps. Go to Settings → Apps → All Apps → Gallery → Memory and click “Clean.” This will not delete your photos, only temporary files of the application.

Alternative methods and third-party applications

Standard tools are often not enough for advanced users. There are many file management applications, such as Files by Google or Solid Explorer, that provide more flexible sorting and deleting tools.

Third-party cleaners can analyze the contents of memory and suggest that similar photos, screenshots or low-quality images be deleted, but be careful about allowing such applications.

Connecting to a computer through USB-And cable is another reliable way (MTP) You can use the power of desktop Explorer to quickly sort and delete thousands of files at once.

The choice of method depends on the amount of data. For a couple of pictures, you can use a gallery, for cleaning tens of gigabytes, you can use a computer or a file manager.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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Regular cleaning of the basket and folder.thumbnails is the most effective way to maintain free space on the smartphone without losing important data.