Does deleting a hike delete its photos and video clips too?

The short answer

Yes. Deleting a hike removes everything captured as part of that recording — the photos, video clips and voice notes pinned along the route — because none of that media ever existed anywhere except inside the recording it belonged to. That is the opposite of deleting a single photo, which removes one marker and leaves the rest of the hike, and everything else pinned to it, exactly as it was.

Why the media does not survive on its own

A photo, clip or voice note captured while a route is recording is saved by the app doing the recording, not by the iPhone's own Camera app — it is attached directly to the point on the track where it was taken, and that attachment is where it lives. A photo taken with the ordinary Camera app has an independent life in the system Photos library whether or not any GPS track happened to be running at the time; a photo captured from inside a hike recording does not have that second home. It was never filed away anywhere else, so there is nowhere for it to keep existing once the recording that holds it is gone.

This is also why the relationship only runs one way. A route's GPS points do not depend on anything pinned to them, so deleting a photo never touches the track. But the media does depend on the route it was pinned to, in the most literal sense: the point it is attached to is the only place it is stored. Remove that point, and there is nothing left for the photo to be attached to.

Why an export made earlier does not help

Exporting a hike as GPX or CSV before deleting it does not preserve the media either, though it can feel like it should. A GPX or CSV file only ever holds coordinates — latitude, longitude, elevation and time — and never had a field for an attached photo, clip or voice note in the first place. Deleting the hike afterwards does not reach into an export that already exists and change it, but the export was never a backup of the media to begin with, so it does not soften the loss the way it might seem to.

The only thing that actually keeps a photo

If a specific photo or clip from a hike is worth keeping and the rest of the walk is not, saving that one item somewhere else before deleting the hike is what actually preserves it. Once the hike it was pinned to is gone, there is no second copy sitting anywhere waiting to be recovered — the media and the recording it belonged to were never two separate things with two separate lives, just one thing viewed two ways: a point on a route, and whatever was captured at that point.

Things that trip people up

• Assuming a photo has a life of its own in the system Photos app just because it was taken during a hike — it does not, unless it was captured with the ordinary Camera app rather than pinned from inside the recording.
• Exporting a hike right before deleting it, expecting the export to double as a backup of the photos — an export only ever held the coordinates, so nothing about the media travels into that file either way.
• Deleting a hike by mistake and hoping the media survives separately — because the media was never stored anywhere except attached to that recording, there is nothing left over to recover once the recording itself is gone.
• Confusing this with deleting a single photo — removing one item pinned to a hike leaves the rest of the walk, and everything else captured along it, completely untouched.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam pins a photo, a video clip or a voice note to the exact point on a route where it was captured, and everything pinned to a hike is part of that one recording rather than a separate file sitting elsewhere. Deleting a single item removes just that marker; deleting the hike itself removes everything that was ever attached to it. Export as GPX 1.1 or CSV, for keeping the shape of a route even after the original is gone, is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.