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

I have the same issue - all photos are deleted but iPhone > setting > usage says 2.7GB are used by photos (I have iPhone 5 using iOS 8.1.2)

I wish not to reinstall the iOS or to install a third party app on a PC to solve the issue. Is there any other way??

WWhen you delete photos from your library they don't really free up space because they go into a folder called Recently Deleted. Go into your photo library and at the bottom select Albums. You should see the Recently Deleted folder. Select that and then you can delete the photos a second time to make them go away permanently and free up the space.

Thanks for suggesting i-funbox.  Had over 8GB worth of hidden photos. iTunes can't see it. Windows Explorer can't see it. i-Funbox did the trick. Actually found hundreds of old pics in multiple "Camera" folders. My sanity thanks you

I have this same problem and there are definitely NO photos on my phone. All Albums are 100% empty, including the "Recently Deleted" album. When I connect my phone to iTunes the storage bar says I have 1323 photos (3.27GB). When I use the Settings app on my phone (under Settings -> General -> Usage -> Manage Storage) the "Photos and Camera" app is apparently taking up 3.2GB of space, by far the biggest consumer of space on my phone. It's driving me crazy. I've also installed the iFunBox app and that doesn't seem functional at all --- I actually can't see any files using this app.

I found a partial solution. After reading some forums I downloaded a desktop program called iMazing (http://imazing.com). In that program I clicked on the "Photos" menu and a progress bar appeared saying "Loading Photos" --- this continued for about 60-90sec but then completed and said that the folder was empty. When I click the "Get Info" button for the Photos folder it says size of the folder is 0B. Same for the Camera folder (0B).

However, in the File System folder I found --- that's right! --- 1323 photographs. Cannot be a coincidence that is exactly the number of photographs that iTunes says I have on my phone. I found these photos under "File System -> Media -> DCIM". I copied the photos onto my desktop (just in case) and then deleted the photos from within the iMazing program.

I also found thumbnails of these same photos stored in "Media -> Photo Data -> Thumbnails -> V2". The thumbnails alone were taking up almost 1GB, so I deleted those too.

Interestingly, only photos from 01-Oct-2014 were "stuck" in this Media folder, so this seems to have been a problem that started a few months ago. If I hadn't fixed it I guess my phone would've eventually just been filled to the brim with these undeleted photos?

Deleting these photos definitely freed up space on my phone.

However I did say this was a partial solution. In iTunes it still says I have 1323 photos on my phone. These phantom photos are driving me crazy.

There are actually four files saved under "Media -> PhotoData -> Thumbnails" called 3303.ithmb, 3309.ithmb, 3319.ithmb and 4031.ithmb. I know these are thumbnail files, but each file is HUGE (up to 297MB) so the four of them add up to a big chunk of space. I'd like to delete these 4x files but don't feel confident enough to do that. I don't mind deleting .png and .jpg files, but files with unknown extensions... I'm a little more cautious.

I have the same issue. I've delete all my Camera Roll photos, but the "usage" number still says 7.5GB.

I have an iPhone 6 (iOS 8.1.3) and I don't want to rely on third-party apps like iExplorer... so I was thinking about an alternative. Here's what I think I'll do:

1. Turn off Photo Library from my iCloud backup options
2. Create an iCloud backup (without my photos)
3. Do a full restore
4. Load my latest iCloud backup (without my photos)
5. Hopefully no corrupted files will be back to my iPhone

Do you guys think it would work?

See a similar thread on Photo Library Usage problem quote:

I have deleted photos from iphone 6 but the photo library still takes up a lot of space in internal storage. How can I delete photo library from storage on the iphone?

unquote

on https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6699647

You'll find a handy workaround - if you have sufficient iCloud storage.

I had this exact same problem with my iPhone 6.  I completely emptied my iPhone of photos yet it was telling me that 10.8 GB was being taken up by the photo library.  I have had an mac app called PhoneView for a long time, but it did not report any photos.   Based on advice here I downloaded i-Funbox.  I was hesitant to run it as it is from a developer that is unknown to me and it is not a signed app (so you have to launch it by control clicking on the icon).  I downloaded it to and ran it from a guest account to hopefully add a bit of a safety net.  I was able to run it right from the mounted .dmg image.  Oddly it found 26 folders labeled Camera, Camera1, Camera2 ... Camera25.  Inside about 8 of those I found thousands of pictures.   I think they are mostly if not all rejects from burst photos.  I copied them all to my mac just to mac just to make sure they were not pictures I want to save.  I was then able to delete them by selecting all in each shown folder and control clicking on them. I have my 10.8GB back!  I don't know what those Camera folders are though. This is obviously a bug Apple needs to solve.

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.

Holy crap! This worked for me!  How did you find this out?  Thanks for this.

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.