Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

I had the same issue on my iPhone 5s, which was reporting almost no free space despite the fact that I had deleted ~6GB of photos, cleared the `recently deleted` albums etc, and waited around 6 months. The rolling-back-the-years fix suggested by Lawrence Finch didn't help. In the end, for me the following steps solved the problem:

1. Back up your phone with iCloud or iTunes;
2. Select "Erase all content and settings" in Settings > General > Reset;
3. Restore the phone from the back up.

For me, this process took around an hour and I now have my 6GB back 🙂.

I can't determine from your rant what your problem actually is. I'll make a guess that it is this: Why does my iOS device say I have more photos than I can find?

But if my guess is wrong, please explain better.

OK, so maybe you don't know how to click a link. Here are the instructions that are in that link:

First, check the Recently Deleted album in Photos, which is a new feature after iOS 8.1. If it's empty you may have run into a strange bug, where deleted photos don't actually get removed. To check for this follow these rather strange instructions:

• Go to Settings/General/Date & Time
• Disable Set Automatically
• Tap on the current date/time and roll it back about 2 years
• Tap <General in the upper left
• Launch the Photos app and go to the Recently Deleted album (even if it says there are 0 photos)
• Is it full of photos? If so, delete them
• Go back to Settings/General/Date & Time and turn Set Automatically back on

Thanks to @txforever for this solution

Ok, none of the suggestions worked but I eventually solved my problem ( of having 2.1GB of photos in the storage indicator in settings despite all photos being deleted from the device).

I tried:

- removing deleted photos

-changing the date backwards 1, 2,3 months, 1,2,10 years. No new deleted items ever appeared even if I went into the deleted items folder.

-removed all photos from my dievice using windows DCIM view

- used ifunbox to remove thumbnails

- ifunbox to remove all contents of all photo and photodata folders including all the folders, databases everything. All those folders were completely empty. Still 2.1GB of 'photos'. Lies.

Eventually did a full backup in iTunes then erased all content and settings on the phone. Then restored the iTunes backup and it shows 'no data' in the section for photos. What a palava. 4 hours. Apple: please fix.

Exact. Same. Issue.

Same problems with iphone 4s and ipad mini.

Why oh why, did i update 😢

I think you need to go to Albums and then Recently Deleted. There you will find all the local photos that have been deleted in the last 30 days but are still recoverable. Select All and deletes these, assuming you no longer want the option to recover them. This will free up local storage.

I have the exact same problem. I have deleted all photos from the phone, everything from the recently deleted, every single photo. In usage it still shows Photos and Camera is using 4.4GB. When I connect to iPhoto it doesn't show any photo in the phone either so there's definitely no photo in there. Don't know why the phone thinks there is 4.4GB of photos in the usage part. I have restarted the phone as well. Nothing.

If anybody found a solution for this, can you please update. I'm using iPhone 5 with 8.1.2 software.

I think if you have the iCloud backup turned on, it'll back up all of your photos and videos to your phone regardless of whether you delete it or not. Your photos and videos will stay in the cloud as well as be stored on your iPhone's internal storage. You can check to see whether all of the photos and videos are still stored with iCloud in your iPhone or not and if they are, you can decide what you want to do with them. I may be wrong, but I hope this works for you. 🙂

Exactly same problem here. Didn't have iCloud backup enabled for my phone photos either. Has been ongoing for a while but it is beyond a joke now because i've got over a third of my iphone taken up and have just deleted every single image and video on the phone to no avail.

Just glad that i'm not the only one. Though it seems like a fairly huge bug for Apple not to have fixed since what appears to be december!

Ridiculous.

Anybody managed to get into a store at all or spoken to Apple about this?

I've not been on here before but i'm guessing they've got bigger fish to fry than have moderators tend to our whines on the forum?

Will pop in when next passing a store and update this if they manage to offer anything other than "reset your phone"

Its the same problem in this thread that everyone else is having. I don't have any photos in my photo library yet Photos & Camera showing 4.2GB being used. I have used itunes to delete these and they don't show up there either. Again same problem that everyone else is seeing. I also don't see where this problem has been solved. Many on this thread were in 2015

Hi, I had the sames issue and struggled with it for a while until I found the solution.

Problem:

I had disabled iCloud Photos, deleted all local pictures and emptied the recently deleted album. Still, the Photos app was using 1.3GB of space on my device.

Reason:

there are some kind of thumbnail files left on the device that weight several hundred MB each.

Solution:

I used PhoneView, an app for Mac that lets you browse your iPhone's memory and even delete some files (without jailbreaking). There are other utilities than PhoneView, for Windows and Mac, that do the same thing and some are even free.

The files to be deleted are located in PhotoData -> Thumbnails and are named XXXX.ithmb. In PhoneView's settings, I had to enable "show entire disk" to display these folders.

Im using Iphone 6S 16GB with the latest Software Update i.o.s 9.2.1. but I got the "Memory Full Issue". I have 11.6 GB capacity but now I have only 1 GB remaining memory, my Apps and files doesn't add up... I tried the Phone Reset by pressing the home and power button together. I'll attached the screenshot of my phone Storage and Apps...

HHey Sheroy

im glad it helped you!

however.. After a day of usage, my phone is slowly losing the free space.. From 10gb to 3gb and now 1gb. I foresee another freeze again and I hope Apple can solve this issue soon.

FYI I have clocked 10 diagnostics event in a day.. Not sure if it helps.

thankyou in advance!

houston9820 wrote:

The one and ONLY way to recover storage on an iphone is to reset to factory defaults. Back up your

photos and contacts etc. and reset the sucker. None of the other options offered on this forum work.

Save yourself the aggravation and reset!

WRONG.

Why does my iOS device say I have more photos than I can find?