# How to Delete Tweets With Photos Attached

> How to Locate and Delete Tweets with Photos in Bulk: Can you find tweets containing photos, what will happen to the images, deleted media appearing in replies, etc.

- Source: https://tweetsweep.com/blog/how-to-delete-tweets-with-photos-attached
- Published: 2026-10-21
- Reading time: 6 min

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## Separate Attention for Photos in Tweets

Text tweets behave differently than photos attached to it when you delete them. Which means of course that the image itself is hosted on X's content delivery network and given its own unique URL. Good thing too; when you delete a tweet X deletes the actual tweet from your profile and removes it from search (for most users with relatively few followers), but the image URL is often left live for an indeterminate period. That means that somebody who saves the link to your image might still be able load it in a browser, many moons later when the tweet is gone. It doesn't just disappear from X's servers, and cached copies on third-party sites can last significantly longer.

The visual context problem is also another one. The data that a photo of your face, your home, the vaccination card you received on the way to work last week and even a receipt from years back contains is information text alone cannot provide. And even if you delete the tweet, a screenshot or forwarded copy of that image may come back and haunt you. The photo also occupies space in your data export and is included in your archive size. However, if you are tidying up your timeline for privacy reasons, photos is usually the highest risk content you will delete as these really identify you on any particular visual and geographic level without needing words to describe them.

## Find tweets on your timeline that contain photos

Currently, there isn't a direct operator in X's advanced search for tweets with media. That said there are a few different workarounds you can use to find Twitter photo tweets. The surest way to know is to look for your tweets made from the native X app, as this will have uploaded the photo directly. You can also search for common alt-text phrases that X attaches automatically to the images you attach, such as Image or Video. To achieve this, simply enter the following query in X search: from:yourusername has:media. This will return you all the tweets in which any media type is there, whether it be photo/video/GIF.

To narrow further include a date range. E.g. from:yourusername has:media until:2023-01-01 since:2020-01-01 This only pulls media tweets for a given period. Alternatively, under a search result on the Media tab, you can make use of media search on X.com. That tab will only display tweets with images or videos, but it does not separate photos vs other media. To get the entire list, you must download your X archive and dig through the inner workings of that tweet. Create a js file, where you will include the media_keys from your entries The file contains every single post you were ever made, and if you know your way around a text editor or a script, you can filter for media attachments.

## You Delete the Tweet, What Happens to the Photo?

If you tweet an image, when that tweet is deleted, X deletes the visual representation of that tweet from your timeline (like it does for tweets), deletes it from search results, and also removes the photo from its public API. However, the actual image is still hosted on Xs own content delivery network but the URL remains unchanged. Instead, X seamlessly deletes the image file from its servers. The interval differs, but a report suggests the URL stays live for days or weeks after its deletion. It is still possible for anyone with the direct image link to see it during that window. It no longer links to your profile but the image still exists on the internet.

If someone views the URL after X eventually purges the image in question, it returns a 404 error or whatever deletion placeholder appropriate for deleted images. But that does not extend to copies in other places. Your removal of the original tweet does not affect any copies of it, created when someone downloaded the image, screencapped it or embedded it on a different site. The photo may have already been archived by third-party services that scrape X. If the tweet was actually indexed, the image will be visible in Google's cache of that tweet until that expires. First off, simply deleting the Tweet is not going to be like removing the image from all corners of the web.

## Deleting Tweet With Photo: How to Delete All Tweets with Pictures

Tools using X's API for bulk deletion can delete any tweet, including tweets with photos, given that the tool has the ID of the tweet. The deletion rate limit is the same as any other API request: fifty per fifteen-minute window per authenticated user. I recommend deleting slowly if you have thousands of photo tweets, it takes multiple rounds. It does this by going through every tweet it finds matching your filter, trying to delete them all, and then stopping when the limit is reached. The complete timings are dependent on how many photo tweets you have and the retry logic of the tool.

Before you begin determine if you want to delete only media tweets or all tweets during a time period that happen to also have photos. Certainly: Some bulk deletion services in the background apply filtering based on media_type or whether a media_key is present in the tweet object. If the tool you are using offers filtering by tweet attributes, you can select only tweets that contain images and leave tweets without text intact. Should the tool not support that filter, you can carry out a separate deletion pass for a date range that you are aware of being prevalently photo tweets but will have to accept some text tweets in that range may also be deleted. Never give authorization if the tool does not help media filters (check in the documentation of a device)

## The Problem is Not Over When You Delete a Photo on Twitter

Deleting is permanent, and deleting a tweet with a photo will remove the photo from your profile. There is no recycle bin. When a tweet with engagement (e.g. reply, retweet, like) is deleted those interactions are also removed from public view as well. The parent post is hidden as a result, so people who immediately responded to your tweet will see that it is unavailable. Their responses still exist on their own profiles, but the chain has been severed. The image URL will probably still work for a while, but there's no longer any visible link to your account. Once deleted, the tweet and its engagements cannot be restored.

If you use the photo in a quote tweet or in a thread, deleting the original breaks this visual intimacy not only for you but also everyone who saved the thread. If any analytics data associated with that tweet it lost. In a similar vein, if the photo is your only copy of an image, deleting the tweet deletes your access to it via X—if you want those original files, you need to download the archive first. The image files themselves are included in the X archive export, but separated into their own folder so you will have a local backup too if you ask for it before hitting delete.

## Dealing with quoted or embedded photo tweets

In the case of someone quoting your tweet, the quote post will be a separate tweet that belongs to the owner of that quote. Quoting your original tweet doesn't delete it. You'll see a broken tweet placeholder that replaces your content with the quote, but the text of the quote and additional commentary from the quote author. That would also be the case in a situation where an individual embedded your tweet on a site or blog. The code you embed in display references the URL for your tweet, and once you delete that tweet — the embedded version is shown as not available. But the site might have saved a copy of the image — or the full tweet text — before you deleted it.

Also, you can simply ask the person who quoted you to delete their quote tweet, though they are not forced to. Retweets will need to be removed by going through a third party site's own content removal process — another task entirely, with no guarantee either. The best solution would be to delete the tweet as soon as possible before it is widely shared or embedded. Once an image propagates, it is easy to focus on every nook and corner of the Internet to recall back your data. That deletion gets it off the surfaces of X itself, but does not reverse what happened with distribution.