Q: More photos in settings than photos app shows

Having the same exact problem Moonfoot.  Have been messing with it for a few hours now and can't figure it out. 

So you have deleted all photos off of your device, have turned off Photo Stream, and you still see storage being taken up by photos?

Do you have iCloud Photo Library beta turned on under iCloud by any chance?

Cheers,

GB

I ended up restoring to factory settings and it worked, but when the iPhone boots up and asks you if you want to restore with a recent iCloud backup or iTunes backup, choose iCloud. I restored with iTunes first and the mysterious photos were still there, but when I did it again and chose iCloud, they were gone. It takes a while longer for all of your apps to load when you restore with iCloud, but I'm not missing any apps, nor did I lose any game progress or anything like that.

Most excellent, and a good tip to know! Thanks for posting back with your success story This may help other posters in future!

Cheers,

GB

I found out the solution!  Not sure how but try these steps.

1.  enable/disable icloud photo library.    Settings - icloud - photos - then enable icloud photo library (beta)!

trust me!  tell me it works!

I already tried that multiple times before restoring to factory settings and it didn't work.

I managed to get rid of the phantom usage. Restoring iPhone and resetting the phone settings/data do not work for me.

I had to move the Date on my phone earlier by 1,2,3 months and found the phantom photos in the Recently Deleted Folder. Next, I deleted the photos manually from the Recently Deleted Folder and the usage got freed up from my iPhone.

Hope this works for you

What an interesting discovery! I went into my iPhone 5s and deleted all of the photos from my Recently Deleted folder. Then I changed the date back to 10/1/14, and went to the Recently Deleted folder again. Although at the album level it said "0" photos, when I tapped on the album, there were another 101 photos that had been automatically deleted from Recently Deleted by the iOS (photos over 30 days).

Put the calendar back to 2/1/14, and went back to Recently Deleted, and this time found "No Photos or Videos".

Since Recently Deleted is supposed to only keep those deleted photos for 30 days, I wonder why they are not actually removed from the device when they are removed from the Recently Deleted folder?

I'm going to send feedback to Apple about your discovery. If you would also like to send your findings here is the link:

Apple - Feedback

Cheers, and thanks for sharing your excellent troubleshooting results!

GB

Hi,  ended here with the same problem and your solution (finally) worked. (with iphone 6, iOS 8.1.3)

Thank you !

I think I may know the cause of this, maybe. So I tried everything and was just as confused as everyone. I fixed all of my iCloud settings and everything. Then I thought, "If there is no photos in recently deleted, shared, or none are sync'd to back up, maybe apps that have access are storing a whole other set of photos on your phone you don't know about. I went under Privacy>Photos> and turned off all of my app allowences and it went from 1182 to 1161. Not that many pictures were removed, but I think I'm on to something.

It also worked for me going back to a date a few months ago. I found the 591 photos. Deleting them elapsed the counter, and freed up memory space. Thank you very much txforever for the solution.

Thank you, txforever! This worked for me.

My Usage said I had 9GB of photos when I clearly didn't. Moving the date to several months earlier revealed over 4,000 photos/videos in the Recently Deleted album. Thanks, txforever!

I wish I'd found this before you had to restore because i wonder if you had the same issue i did. my itunes showed over a GB of photos, my phone showed 20 pictures. ended up it was all in the text messages i'd sent and never deleted.

TThis worked for me!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WT3Z0Hals4