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

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!

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.