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Floop1977 Author

Level 1

9 points

Deleted all photos from iPhone, still says taking up 8GB+

Hi,

I'm a longtime iPhone user, and am currently using an iPhone XS. I'm on the latest version of iOS, and the latest version of Catalina on my iMac.

Periodically we all run out of space, and normally I connect to my Mac and offload photos I want to keep.

Anyway today I did that, all photos offloaded into the Photos app (I don't use iCloud for this, as I want full control over my photos).

Afterwards, I deleted all the photos and videos from my iPhone... including the Recently Deleted folder but the iPhone reports that even with everything deleted, Photos is still using 8GB+ of my 64GB storage.

What gives, and how can I solve it? Photos showing the problem are below.

I'm not keen on an erase and restore, I'd prefer to figure out how to flush this 8GB off the phone. I have no idea why it is doing this.

Any help gratefully appreciated!

Nick

iPhone XS

Posted on Jun 11, 2020 12:05 PM

Top-ranking reply

Floop1977 Author

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Jun 11, 2020 12:16 PM

Okay, so I solved my own question.

I had manually deleted all the photos from my iPhone, it showed there were 0 on there.

However, when plugged into my Mac, I went into Finder and then selected the iPhone in the lefthand pane, and I could see that photo syncing from my iMac to my phone was turned on.

I turned this off, and clicked Sync, and a couple of minutes later, the problem was solved.

It's odd that my 8GB of synced photos were still stored on the phone, even though they weren't viewable, and I see this as an unfortunately poor software bug. At least I managed to solve it, and I leave this information here in case it can help anyone else.

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Deleted all photos from iPhone, still says taking up 8GB+

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