Itunes says that I have more photos on my Iphone than I actually do, please help

I had this problem, too.

I have fixed it. It cost me 99 cents.

My phone said I had 247 photos/videos. Itunes said I had 1700+. Both said that Photos & Video were taking up 10.8 GB of storage.

On my phone, I went to Settings --> iCloud --> Storage --> Change Storage Plan

I selected the 20GB plan for $0.99 a month

Then, I went to Settings --> iCloud --> Photos

I enabled My Photo Stream (slider to the right/green)

Then, I got on WiFi. I don't know how long it took, certainly not long enough to upload gigabytes of data, but I saw that my Photos & Camera app was using a far more reasonable amount of storage (1.3 GB, rather than 10.8 GB). I checked this by going to

Settings --> General --> Usage --> Manage Storage

Because I don't want the 20GB iCloud plan, I went back to

Settings --> iCloud --> Storage --> Change Storage Plan --> Downgrade Options (at the bottom)

... and I selected the 5 GB Free plan again.

Now for a little rant.

I am very unhappy that I had to give Apple one thin dime to have this fixed. After spending a couple of hours trying to figure out why I can barely use any storage on my phone, I had to pay to fix it. Ridiculous.

I still enjoy using Apple products, but I enjoy using them less and less over time. Not only is every release of iTunes less usable than the previous one, the last one wouldn't even install on my machine. That was about another six hours lost trying to figure out the problem.

I'm not sure if this is a first world problem. Ugh! My life is so hard!

THANK YOU!!! Demuelle is the first answer I've found that works. And Apple should be ashamed of itself for making this so ridiculously difficult. I agree that using their products becomes less appealing with each new upgrade of the iOS or phone. Thank you for your creative solution and help!

Hey there,

I have been dealing with this same issue for a couple months and I have finally found a solution. My phone was out of memory but I deleted all of pictures on the phone; Itunes still insisted I had over 4,000 pictures. By this time, I was about to do the .99 cents to upgrade my storage space but instead, this is what I did:

Go to Settings --> General --> Date & Time --> UNTOGGLE Set Automatically

**You need to set your date back a couple years. After you set the years back, go to:

Photos --> Albums --> Recently Deleted

** You need to delete all of this "Recently Deleted Pictures". For some reason all the pictures you deleted months back are still on your phone! Once you delete all of the pictures in this folder, you will have memory!!! Now I can use my phone!

Don't forget to set your date and time back to normal once you are done.

So helpful thank you!

Gold. Worked like a charm, freeing 2.5GB on my iPhone 5s 16GB.

This was so helpful, thank you so much 😁

Maybe I'm just getting old or maybe just burnt out, but I'm so frigging sick of these backflips that one must do to get simple maintenance things done on these iphones. And it gets harder with each passing year and new phone instead of easier. Try deleting old texts if you want a real acrobatic experience. And now I have a reminder on my PC that pops up EVERY SINGLE MINUTE, I swear to God, saying my iCloud storage is almost full. And it's nothing but a gimmick to get me to buy more storage. I can't make it stop. iTunes, over the years, has somehow created 3 and 4 copies of my photos until I now have over 4,000. I really have only about 1,500. I don't have a spare month to attempt maintainacne on all these duplicate photos. I just can't go on like this. I can't. 😢

Why does my iOS device say I have more photos than I can find?

I have never participated in an online tech support discussion group before - but I had to thank you for posting this because your suggestion instantly cleared up several gigs of storage on my iPhone. Love apple products but sometimes they have funky issues.

Thanks!!

I found out about all this when I realized I missed half my music on my iPhone... Turns out only the music I bought from iTunes was on my iPhone and not the music I ripped from my CDs. ANGRY. Tried to put music back on but iPhone full... Wifi transfer of photos is no longer working (what is up with that) and Googled what to do. Had to install OneDrive on both PC and iPhone and it took only about 15 hours to transfer 273 photos. Frustrated much... Now I find out the photos are not saved in jpeg but in iOS - no clue how to fix that but too tired and angry to care right now. No photos on iPhone and it says there is...OMGosh kill me now. Finally Googled that problem again and did the date switcheroo and sure enough, put all my music back on. Still not happy and as someone said before "Apple prides itself on user friendliness"... Yeah, maybe 10 years ago - this is NOT COOL. My plan is up, I am truly considering jumping ship. Sorry Apple, you are dropping the ball.

I had the same problem, but my cause was a little different. Sometimes 3rd party apps store photos on the phone without your knowledge. My culprit was the flickr app. Check the photo settings on your apps. For example, for Flickr:

Settings / Privacy / Photos / Flickr

So, I turned it off and back on and the problem was instantly fixed. Yeah!

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Apple, a little more detail on what is taking up space would help a lot!

Misty if i could I would give you a big fat kiss - i just deleted over 20GB (1900 photos) from my phone that was stored God knows where! It worked like a charm - I have been dealing with this issue for over 3 months you are the best!!!!!!!!!!