Use the web version for anything at scale
photos.google.com and the mobile apps do not have the same selection tools. The web supports shift-click range selection and per-day header checkboxes; the apps support neither. For a few dozen photos it does not matter, and above that it is the whole job.
The mechanic is the one you already know from file managers. Hover a photo, click the circular checkmark in its corner, scroll to the far end of the range, then hold shift and click that photo's checkmark. Everything between the two is selected at once.
Date headers have their own checkboxes, which select every photo from that day. Clicking down a list of headers is the fastest way to clear a specific trip, event or week without touching anything around it.
Narrow the view before you select anything
Deleting from your full library is where mistakes happen, because a range selection can quietly include photos you never scrolled past. Filtering first makes the range safe to trust.
Search terms work well for this. 'Screenshots' opens the auto-generated category, a year narrows to that year, and a place or person filters to those. What you see is what shift-click will select.
This pairs naturally with the categories Google already flags. Review and Delete groups blurry photos, screenshots older than a year, and long videos, and each of those is a safer starting selection than raw chronology.
Bulk selection on Android and iOS
Long-press any photo to enter selection mode, then drag without lifting your finger. Every photo you pass over is selected, and holding near the top or bottom edge scrolls the grid while the selection continues.
It works, and it does not scale. Drag speed is the limiting factor, and a long drag through years of photos is both slow and easy to overshoot. If you have hundreds of photos to clear, open a browser instead.
One thing the apps do have is the date header on the day view, which selects that day. Combined with search filtering it covers most of what the web offers, just more slowly.
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Selecting by range is chronological. It cannot find the same photo saved three times across different years, and it cannot group four attempts at the same shot taken seconds apart, because neither of those is a property of position in the grid.
Google offers nothing for either case. There is no duplicate finder in the product, and similar-shot grouping only covers bursts the camera itself tagged at capture time.
That is where a content-based scan earns its place. A perceptual-hash tool groups duplicates and near-identical shots by what the images look like, presents them as groups rather than as a timeline, and pre-selects a keeper — which is a different and better shape of bulk selection for that particular job.
Delete, review, then empty the Trash
Deleting in Google Photos is a two-stage operation, and forgetting the second stage is why people report that a big cleanup freed no storage. Deleted photos move to the Trash and hold your quota there for a full 60 days.
Treat that window as the review step rather than an annoyance. Open Library → Trash after a large bulk delete and skim it before emptying — anything you regret is one Restore click away until you clear it.
Google Drive keeps a separate Trash on a 30-day timer. If your cleanup spanned both services, empty both, or the storage number will only move halfway.