My iPhone 5 camera roll is empty, but under usage says 3.1GB - how can I delete?

One of our fellow users (txforever) discovered a workaround that may fix this issue:

Go to Settings>General>Date & Time, and set your date back to September 1, 2014, then go back to your Deleted Photos folder. Click on it (even though it says there are 0 photos, and you may see additional photos that need to be manually deleted.

THIS IS THE CORRECT WORKAROUND!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

scabthepoetMar 15, 2015 2:00 PM Re: My iPhone 5 camera roll is empty, but under usage says 3.1GB - how can I delete?
Re: My iPhone 5 camera roll is empty, but under usage says 3.1GB - how can I delete?in response to armccoy

I've been searching for an answer to this very problem for a solid day. Here is what I did that worked for me. No reset. No need to upgrade to more Cloud storage or anything else. I had already deleted out every picture from my phone, including "Messages" and the "recently deleted" album, etc. There really are phantom pictures in there, but the only way to see them and delete them is to:

1. Go to Settings
2. Date & Time
3. Untoggle "Set Automatically"
4. Manually change the date back. For example, if today is March 15, 2015, choose August 1, 2014. (You can change it back once we're done)
5. Close out of that
6. Open "Photos"
7. Select "Albums"
8. If, like me, you had already cleared out everything from the Camera Roll and "Recently Deleted" folder, you'll smile to see that your "Recently Deleted" folder now has thousands of images back. Those are your phantom photos
9. Open it, "Select" and start deleting
10. Now, go back into Settings - General - Usage - Storage - Manage Storage - and you'll notice your Photo & Camera is empty if you deleted everything

I hope this works for everyone and that I saved you all the time I wasted searching for an answer myself -- only to never find one. Now you have the answer.

I went from barely having any room left on my phone to almost brand new again.

Take care.

Worked beautifully... thanks so much!!

any possibility that you had things in the "recently deleted" folder? I don't know if thats much help but those things can add up and possibly equal up to 3.1 gb if you delete a lot of things.

Already wasted bunch of times for finding the phantom photos. Thank You for the time-setting idea, worked fine for me.

Thank you thepartydj. Your method worked for me. So dumb that it has to be done that way, but very happy to have the storage back. Come'on Apple, your better than that.

This has made my day! My phantom photos are gone and storage is back. Thank you so much!

Freaking amazing. Thank you for your sacrificed time in finding the solution to this problem. Saved my butt. Date and time affects such strange things!

Oh my gosh. This worked like a charm! You're a life-saver, or at least a memory-saver!🙂

I Have the same problem too.I tried to delete the "recently deleted" album. The photos were totally gone and never can be found anywhere in my app. But I just wonder why the memory of my photos is still 1gb where in fact it is empty. Well maybe we really need to wait for the 30days in the recently deleted album so that it is truly gone. I hope we can fix our bug sooner.....

This works! Thank you so much! I was going crazy

I created an account just to say Thank-you. I have been searching for the answer for some time.

I tried your solution and magically it worked perfectly !

Many thanks for your help !

I have had same problem for 2 days and tried everything on here to no avail, (I have iPhone 6 by the way) then I went to settings-photos & camera-icloud photo library and toggled it off, it asked me to "remove from this phone" which I did, now it's sorted, no more space issues! (then I toggled it back on after).

Hope this helps!

Thank you so much for the steps! I had researched this because the 3 iPhones in my house were all showing GB of storage used with only a couple of pictures. I was getting ready to reset all the phones when I found your post. Worked like a charm! Wado (Thank you)!