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

OMG! Thank you SOOOOO much! You are a life saver! It worked perfectly for me.

OMG! Thank you SOOOOO much! You are a life saver! It worked perfectly for me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

THIS ACTUALLy WORKS

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.

I've had this problem on my phone for 2 months now but didn't have the time or patience to figure it out.

I'm so pleased I came over your post scabthepoet - you're a star. This has totally solved my problem and freed up 4.7GB of space on my photo - absolute legend!

Thank you so much.

To scabthepoet

I can't think of a logical debug sequence that led you to this 😁 but it worked like a charm.

Thanks a lot for saving the search! this helped me a lot.

Best Regards.

I have an Iphone 6 and have had the same problems. Download a program called iExporer from Macroplant. They have Mac and PC versions. Sniff around and find folders named pictures or photos and you will find a folder or several folders called thumbnails. Delete those and you will regain your lost storage space.

Very helpful...works.

This was SO helpful!!! Thanks so much for posting!

Thanks! This did the trick!!!

I have this same issue on my iPad and have tried the reset the time fix to no avail. Anyone know if this fix works on an iPad? Thanks.

I have had this problem for a long time and your method fixed it. Thank you!

Many Thanks. This saved me a lot of trouble. (I ended up finding over 1000 pictures in the "deleted" folder after rolling back the date)

Sometime I wonder (although I'm glad) how do people find these fixes!!!

This helped me!! Thanks a lot for getting rid of the ghost data storage😁