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

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.

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.

I have same issue with my iPhone6 and I have tried this solution. After untoggling the date, I still couldn't find anything in deleted items folder to delete . And my space is still being taken up. Any answers pls.

I have an old iphone 4 that was practically bricked by one of Apple's system updates, namely it made it run so hot that the chip for bluetooth and wifi was destroyed, so now I just use it as a dashcam. I can still connect to my PC via USB but one video that was visible on the iphone could not be seen by iTunes (or any of several other programs that are supposed to find hidden files). Your solution enabled me to find the video file and restore it and to delete several other files to free-up storage on the phone, i.e. it helps with restoration as well as deleting "phantom" files. Thanks!

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

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

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 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.

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 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