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Level 2

257 points

Photos taking up an unusual amount of space?

I have a 3rd-gen iPad Wi-Fi running iOS 7. A couple days ago I was syncing my iPad with my computer and it froze. I had to do a hard reset (holding power button and home button) on the iPad and it would sometimes be stuck on the Apple logo and would sometimes start up fine. But it would always freeze when trying to backup. I never had this problem before, but I thought the problem might be related to low free space. The "Other" category had grown to about 7.6GB. I had about 1.2GB free. I was syncing my Aperture library to it (just over 19,000) photos and it was taking up too much space, so I thought I would remove the photos. I have 76 pictures in my camera roll.

In iTunes, I unchecked syncing from Aperture so that there would be no photos from my computer syncing to my iPad. After it completed the sync, both iTunes and the iPad showed that about 43GB were still being taken up by photos, even though in iTunes, nothing under the Photos tab was checked. After trying multiple times, I decided that I would do a restore. (I also tried all sorts of steps to reduce the "Other" section, but to no avail.) So I restored iOS 7.0.2 on the iPad and restored from the backup. Everything seemed OK, so I thought I would try syncing just one event/project from Aperture. It contained 102 photos. After the sync, the iPad said that over 43GB was being taken up by photos and that I only had 894MB free. So I tried removing the photos from the iPad via iTunes again. Same issue; even though no photos were being synced, there was no space on my iPad.

So I did another restore and this time didn't sync any photos from Aperture. So the only photos should be the ones from the camera roll. Now iTunes shows those 76 photos taking up 3.96GB (screenshot below). Which makes no sense. Each photo is not 53MB in size! These are all small pictures saved from Safari or e-mails. At most, a couple MB each.

I don't want to lose app data, like game saves, etc...so I don't want to just set this up as a new iPad. I don't understand why this is happening. My iPhone 5s has no problems syncing my entire Aperture library on the same computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

iPad (3rd gen) Wi-Fi, iOS 7

Posted on Oct 20, 2013 2:24 AM

21 replies

Apfelwurm

Level 4

1,717 points

Oct 20, 2013 4:02 AM in response to mrbofus

In Windows, the iOS devices can be seen by the Windows Explorer as an external memory.

But since iOS 7, files cannot be transferred anymore.

Dec 24, 2013 8:51 AM in response to mrbofus

Hey! when i take photos with my ipad, it saves the to the camera roll, photo stream, and sometimes some other albums too explaining the large size of a few photos!

mrbofus Author

Level 2

257 points

Dec 24, 2013 12:20 PM in response to Thecheater887

Thecheater887 wrote:

Hey! when i take photos with my ipad, it saves the to the camera roll, photo stream, and sometimes some other albums too explaining the large size of a few photos!

Items in your Photo Stream do not take up any extra space on your iPad. A picture that is in your camera roll does not take up any extra space if it is in other albums. For example, if you have a picture that is 1.2 MB in your camera roll and also have it in 3 other albums, it only takes up 1.2 MB, not 4.8 MB. That's why when you delete the picture from your camera roll, it gets deleted from the albums too. The picture in your camera roll is the only picture; the ones in your albums are just shortcuts to the picture in your camera roll.

Sauri

Level 1

0 points

Feb 2, 2015 12:06 PM in response to mrbofus

I've stumbled upon this thread while googling, as I have a similar problem but worse.

My iTunes says that 325 photos take up 3.35Gb on my iPhone.

On iPhone, Settings > Usage > Manage Storage says my Photo Library is 3.4Gb.

Yet I actually have 0 photos on iPhone, nothing in Camera Roll, Albums, Recently Deleted.

Neither iPhoto nor Image Capture on my Mac see any photos on iPhone.

Then I did a full restore and now it's 330 photos of 3.36Gb that aren't visible anywhere.

iPhone 5, iOS 8

Feb 26, 2015 8:12 PM in response to Sauri

Hi Sairi

I have the same problem. Did you find a fix?

Calum

Mar 11, 2015 12:43 PM in response to mrbofus

I had similar situation with iPhone 5. Memory manager said I had 5.2 gigs of photos, even after I deleted them all (and the recently deleted photos). My company's IT support looked into it and said I had corrupted "cashed data partitions" that could not be accessed or deleted. Unfortunately these partitions were captured by iTunes during backup and copied back to the iPhone during restore. Solution was to erase and setup as a new phone. More time consuming but all memory restored.

Photos taking up an unusual amount of space?