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

Wow this is AWESOME! I just got 5GB back on my phone! I honestly thought this seemed a little weird but it totally worked! Thanks for figuring this out and sharing it! - Krissy

Hi guys,

I have gone thru all the steps suggested here - changing the time back and even forward - but when I go to the Deleted Folder, the phantom photos won't appear! It's strange as it works for my other phone which is on iOS 8.2, but failed to work on iOS 8.4.

Help me please!

this totally worked! thank you, you genius!

🙂

Worked perfect. This was a lifesaver. How stupid that I have to change the date to really really delete photos. I should be able to just delete them really one time. Argh. I am now downloading IOS 8.4 since I freed up over 5Gb of storage. I hope it works with IOS 8.4

This was a bug in versions of iOS prior to 8.4. I believe it has been fixed in that version.

Dear scabthepoet,

I have been searching for the answer to this problem for months now and your solution worked PERFECTLY. You rock and thank you for posting!

Cheers

Thanks, ScabThePoet, this has solved the problem for me, too!

hi.

i am exactly in the same situation.

i did everything that is recommended in this post: rolled back the date manually and deleted the remaining pics - disabled the iCould photos library - deleted the Recently Deleted photos - everything.

and just a couple days ago i found, using the iExplore application on my Mac mini, that i have these 4 huge thumbnails files with that weird extension.

they are eating up 1.4 GB of memory space on my iPhone 5C. and my iPhone has only 8 GB of memory.

so my question is the same: is it alright to delete those thumbnails files?

Amaury, worst case scenario: You having to make a full restore from a backup. It's not that bad. I think trying to delete these thumbnails might be a good idea.

My oh my..you must be a God Sent..!

I have been struggling with this issue for a year!!!!

Thank you! thank you! thank you!

I can tel you that Apple representative could not tell me what you have just revealed in my life..It actually reminds me that time that I used to restore my Windows 98 PC with the same date backing process to clean up spy wares etc.."don't like it now? then bring it back to the date you did" approach.

Amazing..my wife would be thrilled to be able to take pictures again on her iPhone.

Again..thanks X 1,000000

NYC

IIlustre Bob,

thumbnails files deleted. No problems whatsoever.

CHeers.

absolutely fantastic scabthepoet. You have restored my sanity and made me free!! A tremendous fix that obviously involved a lot of lateral thinking and it works.......Awesome🙂 Thanks again man,

Andy

If I don't have a "Recently Deleted" album (because I'm on iOS 6) is there any way to still delete these phantom photos?

I don't have enough memory to update my 4s to the latest iOS..

If you are on iOS 6 the only solution is to restore iOS and set up as new, (which will install iOS 9). However, you can update iOS to 9 using iTunes; that does not require any extra memory on the phone itself.

Thanks for your response. I'll give that a go!