ITunes tells me my IPhone doesn't have enough memory for all the items in my iTunes library...

Today, that didn't work. My phone has 32.60 GB free, and my Mac has 456.56 GB free, and I can't back up my phone. (iTunes says "additional 350.3 MB required). My iPad has 27.21 GB free. But when I select my phone, it momentarily shows no space free then corrects itself. I did notice that iTunes switched from synchronizing all books to selected books - it does that periodically (one of the many bugs iTunes has on my computer).

Hello johnmasella,

The following article provides steps that can help resolve this issue by freeing up unnecessarily used space.

iOS: "Not enough free space" alert when trying to sync

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1503

Cheers,

Allen

Hello,

I have literally just had the same problem....iTunes was telling me that I was over capacity by 220GB :S I only has 200 songs haha.

I figured it out....I went through each song on my computer and found that one song that was 3 minutes long was apparently 220GB in size.....So I deleted it from my computer and also deleted it from my itunes library and it worked 😝

That article doesn't exist anymore. No help at all.

I had this problem as well but solved it!

Basically, I had added about 20 songs to my iTunes library. I went to go and sync my iPhone to add them to the music already on my phone when iTunes told me my phone did not have enough capacity. I deleted photos/apps etc. until the sufficient amount of MB/GB was freed. Yet, it seemed that I still didn't have enough space. I guessed the computer must have thought that I was adding my iTunes library on my Mac to the music already existing on my phone. So I freed up all the space on my phone (by just syncing one song onto the phone and hence removing the other 1000) and once that was done I went to sync the entire music library.

You need to remove all your music on the phone and then add it again!

I fixed this by deleting my Music data and synching again.

On an iPhone 4 Settings - General - Usage - Music and delete

Totally useless advice, plus the links don't work. I dealt with the problem by deleting all my music. Why not just say that or do some actual research and give some personal and interactive advice? Wait, it's probably because your company's making tonnes of money and you know we'll buy products regardless and thus couldn't care less. I usually hate jobsworths, but this company should be full of them. Pathetic.

They're a total joke. Delete all your music, mate and that should do it. If not, I actually apologise on their behalf. As useless as chocolate coffee pots.

I had a similar problem, and other answers allude to the kind of solution that works. What was rather annoying for me was that, by deleting a few apps, the iTunes display suggested I should have plenty of room. Furthermore, the error message included the bizarre phrase "the required space is 1.26MB but only 126MB is available": yes, more space available than needed by a factor of 100!

What seems to be the case is that the sync does not necessarily remove everything you specify for removal before copying things on that you want on the device. Therefore, even if you have enough space for what you intend to have on your device at the end of the sync, it won't help if the space is insufficient to copy at least some things on in the first place. So I actually solved the problem by deleting one of the apps on the iPhone, which was an app I was going to remove anyway. In general (on iOS 8), go to Settings | General | Usage | Storage then choose something you are happy to be without.

I couldn't handle losing all my music data (play counts, etc) so I went into my iPhone on iTunes and from there limited what to sync into my iPhone (after deleting podcast data from settings on iPhone and seeing the size needed in the error message decrease) and then I was able to sync without issue. My iPhone shows 2+ GB of space available when I connected my iPhone and 4+ GB of space available after removing apps from the sync screen before trying to sync but was still telling me I was 900+ MB over capacity in the error message. It did complete the sync, but told me 200+ songs couldn't sync. I just added back my entire library and iTunes is showing 5+ GB free for attempt 2.

I was getting the error message not enough storage on iphone as well. I downloaded icloud to my computer (previously only had on my phone), not sure why but after this downloaded I tried it again and successfully backed up my phone from itunes.

This is utterly insane. I had the same problem for weeks - supposedly not enough storage to sync even 1 new song, even when I deleted practically everything from my iPhone 6 (all photos and videos, and all the music except a shortish list of songs that would not delete except manually, individually, and did not show under "manage storage" in Settings, which no longer had music on the list!). The available storage in "Settings" showed more than 8 GB free at this point, but iTunes still claimed there was an overload of 500 MB or so.

What finally worked was UNCHECKING everything in the Playlists and Artists lists in iTunes under the "Sync Music" heading (with "Selected playlists ... etc" selected at the top and "Sync only checked songs and videos" selected under "Summary", and the iPhone connected by USB - all of which may or may not be relevant). As soon as I UNCHECKED everything and clicked "Apply", iTunes synced all of my previous music to the iPhone. I then re-checked some (new and old) playlists and artists in iTunes, and those were immediately synced as well. iTunes now shows another 2.44 GB free, where there was supposedly an overload before. I may now have duplicates of some music, but that is better than being unable to sync any at all.

This has taken hours to solve. Why Apple has to be quite so user-unfriendly, and why it's up to users to resolve all its issues, I'm at a loss to understand.

I tried to do that but it still doesn't work for me and I have over 7GB of free space on my phone. So annoyed that I can't figure out how to fix this!

worked perfectly!

Thanks

I had the same problem, I just backed up and retored the phone and it was fine