I am clearing through my phone for more memory. I want to delete some personal photos and videos of family forever, how can i do this ?. I do not want the photos or videos to be found anywhere.

Question

I am using a Iphone 5c device on software update IOS 7.1.2. I want to delete some personal videos and photos of my family and friends and myself. I am worried that if i delete them they may still be on my itunes account or icloud account. I do not want them on any of my accounts or files anywhere, I would like them gone off of everything. How can i do this?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The answer is not simple. First, are these images in the Camera Roll or the Photos app? Next, do you have Photo Stream enabled? Also, do you back up your phone to your computer or to iCloud, or to both?
If you have Photo Stream enabled then the images have already been distributed to anyone who is subscribed. Nothing that I can think of that you can do about that. The rest of this post assumes that Photo Stream was never turned on.
If the images are in your Camera Roll you can delete them from the Camera app. The won't go anywhere, however, they will still be in your backups.
If you back up to your computer using iTunes you can go to iTunes Preferences, Devices tab, and delete your backups. After deleting all of them, and also after you have deleted the images from the Camera Roll, do a new backup.
After deleting the backups do a Secure Delete of deleted files on your computer. On a Mac you can do this with Disk Utility; have it erase deleted files. On Windows you need to get a 3rd party "shredder" app.
If you back up to iCloud on the phone go to Settings/iCloud - Storage & backup - Manage Storage. Tap on each backup and delete it.
If you have photos in the Photos app that are NOT in the Camera Roll album you need to connect your phone to iTunes, click on the Photos tab, uncheck all of them that you don't want (or uncheck Sync Photos if you want all of them gone), then sync.
Then repeat all of the steps above.