How to Remove Old IPhone Lock Screen Wallpaper

It’s easy to create new wallpapers for your iPhone’s lock screen, but how do you remove them when your wallpaper carousel is full of too many images? The process isn’t as simple as opening the Settings app. While the wallpaper settings let you set or change your iPhone wallpaper, the lock screen and home screen wallpaper removal tool is located elsewhere.

Lock screen customization was introduced in iOS 16. While it made frontages prettier and on-screen widgets neater , the additional bells and whistles made it a little more unintuitive with each subsequent update. Here’s how to get rid of that extraneous wallpaper.

How to remove wallpaper on iPhone

iPhone creates wallpapers in pairs – for the lock screen and the home screen. You can create a pair of wallpapers by going to Settings > Wallpaper .

You’ll notice that a small animation on the wallpaper settings screen describes how to change the lock screen wallpaper. But there is no explanation on how to remove it. Well, it’s simple:.

  1. Lock the screen if it is unlocked.

  2. On the lock screen, touch and hold to open the wallpaper gallery.

  3. Your current wallpaper will be visible, but you can swipe the screen to select any other wallpaper in the gallery to delete.

  4. Swipe up on the wallpaper you want to delete until the Delete (trash) icon appears.

  5. Tap the Remove icon and select Remove this wallpaper .

Photo: Screenshot by Saikat Basu. No attribution required.

A couple of wallpapers have disappeared; You can choose a different pair or create one from scratch by going to the Settings app. Removing unnecessary wallpapers is a good idea if you want to keep your wallpaper gallery uncluttered.

( Tip: You can also open the wallpaper gallery by long pressing on the empty area (at the bottom) of the notification screen .)

Your wallpaper photos will not be deleted.

Please note that deleting lock screen and home screen wallpapers based on your personal photos does not remove the photos themselves from your iPhone. Whether you’ve chosen photos for your wallpaper from the Suggested Photos list or created a Photo Shuffle (a dynamic set of 50 photos that rotate throughout the day), they’ll still remain in your Photos app. You can always go back to the settings options under “Add new wallpaper” and select it again.

However, if you have already deleted the original photo from your photo albums, deleting your iPhone wallpaper will make the wallpaper permanent. There is no way to “save” the wallpaper, but you can take a screenshot to save a photo of the wallpaper if it has some memory value.

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