iPhone Photo Library "Ghost" Space

yeah, i also found lots of images in various TouchCopy folders and can't delete all of them, the "ghost" files are still there...

what kind of a restore did you do? a full one, or just the "content and settings"? Did you lose your text messages (not iMessages)?

hey toddg333, how did you delete them from TouchCopy? as you can probably tell, I am trying to avoid having to do a full restore on my phone

In TouchCopy, select the Files folder on the left-hand side. Then select DCIM. You may see several sub-folders beginning with 100APPLE, then 101APPLE, 102APPLE, etc. That's where my ghost files were. They appeared to be the very first photos and videos I took after purchasing the phone, since they were numbered 0001, 0002, etc. The videos obviously took up the most space. (My guess is that they got cached there automatically the first time I synced the new phone with iTunes, because I wasn't quick enough to turn off Photo syncing in iTunes. After that first sync, I turned off Photo syncing, and the later photos weren't cached. Instead of photo syncing through iTunes, I use Photo Capture on my MacBook Air to download them with more control.) In the trial version of TouchCopy, I could select all of the files, but the Delete Selection button was grayed out. Once I activated the full version of TouchCopy, the Delete button became available, and I deleted the old files in each of those 10xAPPLE sub-folders. I didn't delete the folders themselves, just the files. After that, eject/disconnect your phone safely. Power off your phone, then power it back on and check your usage/free space.

You must have the full version of TouchCopy to delete the files. Rather than pay $25 for the full version, there's an offer to try another piece of software or service. When you sign up for the other trial (I selected stamps.com), you get an authentication code for TouchCopy. You just have to remember to cancel your trial of the other software or service before you get charged for it. Do so at your own risk.

Hope this works for everyone!

One more comment: You don't have to delete the files individually. To delete all files in a folder, select the first one, scroll down, hold down the shift button and select the last one (this will select all, which you also might be able to do with Command/Control A), then hit the Delete button in TouchCopy.

well, that's what I did. And although I deleted them from the "Files\Apple" folders, they still show up in some other places like "thumbnails" and also in the iTunes photos storage tab. the only thing I managed to do, was to reduce the "other" tab, quite significantly.

As for the photos I give up. And I paid the $32 (aussie dollars) for the software...

the only thing to do, is to monitor if I can delete more recent photos that I take. If it just keeps adding them to the ghost files, I will have to restore the phone.

thanks for your input; much appreciate it

After hours trying to figure this stuff out (and I'm a software engineer). I can confirm that this works. There is a bug for sure in iOS 8.1.3 because it should not be this hard.

Anyways, I also got the stamps.com thing so I got the software for free. I plan to cancel stamps.com in a couple of days.

I don't know why TouchCopy didn't work for me, but I've deleted a whole lot of files and I don't know what I have done. I plan to restore the phone from new as soon as I can find the time, because I think I may have deleted files I shouldn't have... i just got so frustrated.

I had done what toddg333 suggested but the ghost files were still present under "Photo cache" files and I couldn't get rid of them... thanks for confirming there is a bug, at least I know I am only frustrated and not mad!

Clearing history and web data in iPhone Safari settings cleared the 'phantom' 2.1gb of photos it said I had on my iPhone!

Many thanks!!

I had this exact same problem with my daughter's iPhone and was able to use i-funbox file browser on my Mac to find and remove a number of large .mov files that she had made on the iPhone. The app name is a little strange, but it is free and works great.

I used iFunBox as well... I found 7 separate camera's listed which contained about 2gb of ghost photos. There are files from an iPhone 5 running iOS7 and photos from an iPhone 6 running iOS8, so the issue is not localized to one particular piece of hardware or software. Very strange indeed.

ifunbox is not as good a solution as txforever's roll back the date solution. While it frees up the space, it does not update the phone's content database, which could lead to data corruption problems later.

Thanks.... definitely wish I would have found that solution first as I just had to dig out a 2 week old backup from a portable drive to restore my iPhone.

I had 476mb of ghost space; listed as 169 photos in the purple data block on my iPhone's iTunes page. I used TouchCopy to delete the photos from the DCIM folder, and the usage space was successfully reduced to 80mb when I checked my iPhone's usage breakdown in settings. However, iTunes still shows a the full 476mb and 169 photos. What should I do?

Thanks

That's the problem with deleting the files using a 3rd party tool. It frees up the space, but does not update the database, so the phone still "thinks" it has all of those files.

Just as a wild guess, take a picture with the phone. Then check again. Sometimes this will help a database correct itself.

You can try the date-change trick that was posted earlier or can be found here: Why does my iOS device show more photos than I actually have?

If that doesn't fix it, back up the phone to iTunes, then Restore iOS on the phone using iTunes and restore the backup.

And if that fails you will have to live with the incorrect information or set up the phone as New.

Thanks Lawrence,

I did exactly what you suggested: iTunes restore and date fix. I would recommend others with this same issue try this option first before resorting to TouchCopy or other 3rd party apps.

Also, make sure you back up to iTunes as well as iCloud in case one of your backups is corrupted. Having an iTunes backup also allows for a MUCH speedier restore (minutes as compared to hours or even days).