iTunes continues to display 5+GB of photo data usage after all photos have been deleted

I was having the same issue on my iPhone. I have an iPad, too, that is doing the same thing (as is my wife's iPhone). Here is what works and what I posted a few minutes ago in the iPhone Apple Support Forum.

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.

I had the same issue with my iPhone where I kept on running out of space and settings showed that photos were taking up all the space. The fix I found was to backup the iPhone, Reset it, and then restore it back without enabling "iCloud Photo Library" (Under settings/photo). This option takes up all the space on the iPhone if you have a large photo library, it would be nice to be able to set a limit on size of this. After I did this I recovered all my space back!😮

Hope this helps..

Rohit

Hello Dustin.LindenSmith,

You may be syncing photos from your computer to your iPad. In this case, the photos would appear in albums separate from the Camera Roll and cannot be deleted via the iPad itself.

To delete synced photos and videos from your device

1. In iTunes, click the Device button in the upper right corner. (If viewing the iTunes Store, click the Library button in the upper-right corner first.)
2. Click the Photos tab in the resulting window.
3. Choose "Selected albums" and deselect the albums or collections you want to delete.
   Note: To delete all synced photos, deselect "Sync Photos from" and, when asked, click "Remove photos."
4. Click Apply.

iTunes: Syncing photos
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4236

Cheers,

Allen

What I used was:

1.Go to settings

2.Scroll down to iCloud

3.Click on photos

4.Turn off (iCloud Photo Library)

5.Then turn off (iCloud Photo Sharing)

6.Then get out, go to usage/storage in general and be happy.

Similar issue here as well. I thought something was wrong with my ipad. However, it seems an issue with syn. As you can see below my ipad shows photos only 795 MB, whereas my itunes for the same ipad shows 1.47 GB.

How do we escalade this issue for apple authorities to review.

I just went through the hassle of logging in to say thank you. My wife basically lost 40+GBs because of this issue. 7000+pics/videos were hidden somehow, even though she claimed she deleted everything.

Thanks a lot dude.

Fix your sh#t Apple.

It seems to be a problem with the syncing - my phone and my iTunes both somehow aren't recognizing that those other 2,000 photos no longer are on the phone. Thus not giving me an option to remove them.

Are you syncing from an iPhoto Library? Then delete the iPod Photo Cache from the iPhoto Library:

See this link: iTunes: Understanding the iPod Photo Cache folder

I'm having this same problem and would really appreciate any support. iPad is showing 6GB of photographs that I just don't have. This problem has been going on for a while, so it's not just an issue of things taking a few hours, or even days, to catch up.

I've worked through all the suggested solutions I've read about, but just can't get any of them to work.

I have

• switched it off and on again - repeatedly
• updated to the latest iOS
• deleted all photos and videos (including the "recently deleted" folder)
• changed the date to every month in the last two years to see if old pictures appear in old "recently deleted" folders - they didn't
• deleted everything from iPhoto as well (that only shows up as 320MB usage)
• checked the iPad on iTunes - no photos showing up there at all
• turned off My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo sharing

I tried to turn on the iCloud Photo Library (Beta) but the effing thing won't let me because it says I have insufficient space available, what with my iPad being rammed full of photographs (that don't exist).

Any update, Delboy? I'm in the same boat as BadBrad09. I have a bloat of "Photos" and "Documents & Data" showing in iTunes that I can't fix by all the tricks found in the forums.

I wonder - could it have anything to do with how we are deleting our photos in the first place? I often use Windows 7 to delete photos, by simply navigating Windows Explorer to my iPhone "Internal Storage" "DCIM" folders like I might do with a digital camera (remember those, Ha!) From there I would copy the pics from the iPhone folder to a folder on my computer. Sometimes I would select the "move" option and sometimes I would use Windows Explorere to delete the DCIM sub-folder from iPhone after copying it. This might explain why nothing is showing up in "Recently Deleted" since they were never deleted from within iPhone. I don't have a solution, but maybe if we can find common ground on the causes and symptoms, we can get somewhere.

Here are my vitals:

iPhone 4S purchased Jan 2013

In iTunes:

• Photos - 1.92 GB with 2094 photos
• Documents & Data - 5.4 GB
• Other - 3.22 GB

(I realize that much of my Documents and Data and/or Other are text/pix messages that I don't want to delete)

On iPhone:

• Photos & Camera - 5.0 GB nearly all from Photo Library (a few MB from iTunes Library and Photo Stream)
• Camera Roll claims to have 1096 and all the other folders are claiming a total of 95 other photos and videos
• Messages - 4.3 GB

I tried setting the date back in time, no luck. I tried turning iCloud Photos on and off and on and off... That freed up 1.0 GB initially when it deleted my photo stream, but nothing since.

I'm having this same problem. I've tried to deselect Sync photos and I've tried syncing to an empty folder. The problem is that there is no prompt to remove photos once I hit sync. I tried to reset all dialog warnings under preferences, hoping this would restore the prompt but no luck there either.

In my actual device - the iPhone library (or collections or whatever it's called now) has 1,624 photos and 30 videos and takes up 5.5GB (the usage seems too high for that number of photos anyway). When I plug into iTunes and look at my device that way, the bar at the bottom shows 3,746 photos totaling 7.22 GB.

It seems to be a problem with the syncing - my phone and my iTunes both somehow aren't recognizing that those other 2,000 photos no longer are on the phone. Thus not giving me an option to remove them.

I had a similar problem with saved messages which I was able to resolve easily and am hoping for a similar "trick" with this problem.

I am now on iOS 8.0.2

For the record the Photo App on your device is where you will find all the images/video causing the problem not through the camera roll, there are options with the photos App to delete and also empty the trash and simply make a new back up and that will solve this

I tried all of the things advised from various sites with no luck. I then tried to think which apps might contain photos (or videos), i.e., Messenger, Avocado etc., and deleted the content of those apps one by one. That freed up about 4Gbs of space and I have no more photos in Usage. I hope this is a help to some.

I managed to get rid of the phantom usage. Restoring iPhone and resetting the phone settings/data do not work for me.

I had to move the Date on my phone earlier by 1,2,3 months and found the phantom photos in the Recently Deleted Folder. Next, I deleted the photos manually from the Recently Deleted Folder and the usage got freed up from my iPhone.

Hope this works for you

This really worked! Thanks for posting! So crazy, but I had to go back almost a year to clear out 400+ photos in the Recently Deleted album that were taking up almost 2GB on on my 4s phone. Makes me wonder if all the rest of the space is actually being taken up or iTunes is just showing it that way... 😐

I hade the same problem, iTunes was saying that I had 2.6 G of photos yet I went through ever related app making sure there were none.. made sure I"wantyourmoney"Cloud has no photos still 2.6 use on my 16G IPAD Air running 8.2 Researched showed this has been a recurring and frequent complaint back to IOS 6 (maybe further) I tried restores and that didn't solve the issue trued the idea of older backup and it finally froze the IPAD hard

I had to go to foced DFU as I had a start uo loop and had to restore the IPAD to the factory settings and the IOS de'jour So be careful with that

I think its 8.2 but thy may have done another release in the time I have been typing. The continuing arrogance of the OS companies to use the consumer as uncompensated beta tester really aggravates me. Sort of reminds of the wisdom of never install a .0 release of DOS . I am going from IOS in phone to Android not because it is a much better OS but because they don't seem be part of release a quarter club and they don't try bilk the consume into a proprietary power/sync cable I think the same will happen when this IPAD dies