Photos on iPhone taking up 32 GB of storage on iPhone with 64 GB even after deleting photos

Here’s another link to a question asked earlier which is probably caused by the same bug in Apple software that has yet to be fixed Why do my photos still take up so many GB… - Apple Community

Yes, I did. I deleted photos, painstakingly, then went to the Recently Deleted folder, and deleted from there. Meanwhile, the latest version of iOS was downloading in the background squeezing out storage surreptitiously. I turned off automatic updates, and disconnected from Wifi. I turned of iCloud for Photos, then turned it off completely. My iPhone was connected to my MacBook Pro with USB cable, it started transferring photos from Photos on MacOS to the iPhone to "keep them in sync" - annoying to an extreme. So I disconnected the USB cable, kept Wifi disabled, Cellular disabled, and deleted all the photos from Photos, and deleted from Recently Deleted, once again. I then enabled Wifi and updated iOS to the latest, 17.4.1. Settings now shows iPhone Storage of 32.51 GB being used by Photos app. Extremely annoying. I'm backing up the phone to MacOS on via the USB cable and will try to restore the phone from the backup.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. Thank you for taking the time to read my response before answering again. This is a bug in Apple Software. I am 100% confident of that, I am retired after working 45 years in the tech industry, I know lack of quality in software when I see. And I see it here.

I restored the iPhone from the backup on MacOS (MacBook Pro over USB cable) and the "Junk" cache is gone, the iPhone is operational again. It ended up "upgrading" to iOS 17.4.1 three times today, once earlier today when I was hoping the latest release would fix the bug, then again when I started the restore from backup (it incorrectly claimed the iPhone wasn't running the latest iOS, so it downloaded iOS 17.4.1 again (on the Mac) and "updated" the iPhone, then a third time after it had finished "downloading software" ... so it got restored to factory settings, I had to set it up again, etc. Almost five hours later it is "fixed" - that doesn't count all the days of frustration trying to offload apps and delete photos while the phone kept running out of storage, squeezing the life out like an anaconda squeezing its prey every time they breath out - days of thinking I was doing something wrong. I bet there's a "ticket" in the bug database that describes this, and someone decided that fixing it was "deferred" or "will not be fixed." Here's a suggestion, Apple, in the code that detects the phone is running out of storage and it puts the pop-up saying "Go to Settings - Manage Now" or "Not Now" - how about doing a quick check to see if the "Junk" cache is squeezing the life out of the phone, the anaconda bug, and instead of throwing the user into "iPhone Storage" in settings to offload apps or turn on iCloud (which don't fix the problem) instead put a more helpful message, something like "You have encountered a bug that thousands before you have suffered, Apple is aware of this, but fixing it is "too hard" so we decided not to fix it. Mind you, you might think that thousands of users encountering this bug would encourage us to fix it, but keep in mind we have billions of users so we don't really care about people like you." With a message like that at least we would know it's not our fault.

Here’s another instance of the same problem, it’s rampant Why is my iPhone' system data taking up 3… - Apple Community

Here’s yet another example of the same unfixed bug iOS, it’s astonishing how long this has been around and remains unfixed If icloud is used to store my photos, why… - Apple Community