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

Bravo. I found your solution after I posted the 9GB question and want to let you know it worked beautifully and hopefully I can give you some points for this important contribution. The only way I could was to "Like" and it registered.

Glad to hear it worked. I had never posted to an Apple Support Forum until this issue sprang up, but after figuring out the answer, I wanted to share and keep others from wasting as much time as I did trying to find a resolution. I tried to find a few boards where similar questions were raised, be it for iPhone or iPad.

Unfortunately changing the date did not work for me, on my iPad it shows I have 1.7GB of photos, when my photo album is empty, even my recently deleted photo album is showing as empty.

Interesting when I link my iPad to ITunes on my Desktop computer the 1.7 GB is showing as other, but cannot find what other refers to.

I also have a flik'r app which was showing 1.1 GB of usage, I deleted this app and re installed it and my flik'r usage has gone down from 1.1 GB to 191MB, but the photo app cannot be deleted on its own.

The iTunes program shows the photo size. Other is something else like pdf files, spreadsheet files, etc. What iTunes shows for photos stored on a desktop computer is the same number as shown on the iPad, Settings, General, Manage Storage.

Thanks for that solution.

I don't know how you worked it out, especially as it appears to be such an intractable fault. Like a lot of people here I'd tried just about everything (including the "official" suggestions) but without any success. However by using your technique - which is wonderfully simple - I have managed to recover 5.6GB.

Apple should have fixed this properly in the first place, however.

Thanks again.

Thanks for sharing your solution - it worked a treat. I have restored 33GB of storage by deleting hidden photos. I had already emptied my deleted items folder so was pleasantly surprised to see over 1000 photos appear by changing the date. Congratulations on figuring out the mystery!

Like you I have tried everything including the date change to delete the 1.7 GB showing against my Photo's app, even although my photo album is empty, included deleted, recently deleted and photo roll etc.

Cannot be in my iCloud as I still have 4.3 GB of space left to use out of my free 5GB.

What I don't understand, is when I look at the usage in ITunes the coloured barometer which shows your usage on my Desktop Computer, there is nothing against photo's, the 1.7 GB of usage is included in the total of other, shown as yellow on the barometer.

I did find on my Desktop I had 1.7 GB of photos stored in my Photoshop elements storage, so I synced them to my IPad which increased my Photo's app storage to 1.8 GB, and this was shown as photo's, coloured mauve on the coloured barometer in iTunes on the desktop. I later reversed the sync and deleted the photos from photoshop elements, whiich took me back to square one, still showing the 1.7 GB in my photo's app on the IPad.

i Understand I can do a full backup of my IPad on my Desktop, then reboot my IPad back to factory settings, but will this not still include my 1.7 GB of photo's when I re install my backup back to my iPad. Don't want to reboot my iPad to factory settings without a backup as don't want to loose all my saved passwords.

if you are showing many GB under photos, not under "other" and you deleted as you say, then you may need to go back to when the iPad year it was new. Make sure you changed to manual for the date and left it there before you look at the photos. Restart to be sure. You did all that, you cannot fail to find the photos. What iTunes shows cannot be different from what the iPad shows. The size of "other" should not be a part of this conversation, they are not related to photo sizes.

When I sync my iPad to iTunes on my Desktop computer and click on IPad, it shows I have 12.50 GB total capacity. it then shows my usage in the coloured graph line at the bottom of the screen as follows.

Apps 3.57 GB

Books 16.7 MB

Docs & Data 771.2MB

Other 4.29 GB

Free 4.06GB

There is no mention of photo's, yet when I look at usage on my iPad it show 8.3 GB used, available 4.18 GB. When I look at the breakdown of the 8.3 GB used, it shows Photos 1.7 GB, although my photo library is totally empty as previously posted.

If I were then to upload new photos to my iPad from my camera card, it would increases my iPad photo library from 1.7 GB by the amount of GB's uploaded. However in iTunes on my Desktop, my free 4.06 GB will have decreased by the amount of the upload, and this amount will now be shown under Photos, But the total photos in iTunes will still not include the 1.7 GB.

Just to add I have changed the date from Automatic and tried various dates including installation date but still no sign of any photos.

THANK YOU!!! I've never logged into this, but wanted to say thank you. This fixed my problem. I was searching and searching and couldn't find how to fix this. I set my date back, and voila 1200+ photos that I was searching for! They were on itunes, but nowhere to be found on my phone. I did everything possible that I could, but nothing worked. Scabthepoet you helped me out! Thank you very much

I show a 4 GB discrepancy between photo usage reported in iTunes and photo usage reported on my iPhone 5S. The iPhone 5S claims ~6 GB while itunes shows ~ 4GB. I tried the date approach above except I did not delete all the visible photos on the phone first. I did not want to get rid of the photos in my camera roll before trying to reclaim this space.

I manually set the date back month by month for about 2 years before I gave up since I never saw the phantom photos show up in the recently delete album.

Do you know if deleting all photos off the phone first is a requirement for this trick to work? Is there another approach to this problem?

I have had the same problem and have tried these exact steps, however when I set my date back and the phantom photos appear, I select them but have no option to delete them. Any suggestions? Very annoying :/

I think the problem is iCloud. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-switch-off-icloud-photos-2014-9

Here's how I finally got rid of 5,000 photos on my iPad. I won't go into great detail because iTunes seems to change every week and iCloud remains a complete mystery to me.

1. Turn off everything to do with iCloud on your device.

2. Do the same on your Mac.

3. Open iTunes and select your device. Click on "Photos" and then go to the synch screen. Ask it to sync but only pick 1 photo - then click sync.

4. Boom, everything disappears from your device (I had to shut down and then reopen my iPad.

HEY APPLE - how about a big device button that says "DELETE LOTS OF STUFF AT ONCE"?

This was super helpful.

I found a variation on your solution: the deleted photos in the trash can have a "will automatically be deleted in" date on them.

I reset the time and date forward, past that date, and then went back and looked in the trash photos and they were all gone.

Then I put the time and date back to auto.

I have found a workaround that worked good and there is no need to change date to OS X or iOS.

Basically you have to extract ghost photos, upload them again to Photos iCloud and then delete them permanently. It works, I have just tried.

in OS X

1) In Finder, go to Images and right-click to Photos Library, select "show package contents".
2) Now you are inside Photos, select Masters folder, search all JPG file inside it and copy ALL of them to Desktop. Close Finder.

3) Open Photos and import all previous photos. Photos will start to import and upload them to iCloud

4) When it ends, delete all photos. Go to Photos menu -> File -> Show recently deleted.
5) Delete them

Magically your ghost space will be 0 gb for photos

🙂 enjoy my workaround