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Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

I have a iPhone5 with ios8.1. I deleted all photo and videos in my photo library to free up space. however, in usage it still shows the photo library used more than 6gb space. in "about" page of setting, it shows 800 photos and 70 videos in my iPhone. but I cannot find any photo in photo library, and not from iTunes or iPhoto by connecting to MAC. it bother me for a few weeks. does anyone have a solution?


Thanks


Ann

iPhone 5, iOS 8.1.1

Posted on Nov 23, 2014 6:30 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Jun 24, 2017 1:19 PM

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 🙂.

172 replies

Feb 25, 2015 2:06 PM in response to WePhoneMA

Same problem with an iPhone 5S. We deleted all albums, all photos, deleted Instagram (just in case), turned off all iCloud options for Photos. Image Capture shows no photos. iPhone shows no photos, no albums, no shared. After deleting Instagram, there is no other app on the phone that uses photos.


Yet the Manage Storage on iPhone says Photos are using 8GB.


We Reset the phone, using "Erase All Content and Settings", and then used Restore iPhone from iTunes.


We've tried everything we could find in lots of forums. And still 8GB is used for Photos that apparently don't exist.

Mar 2, 2015 3:28 PM in response to WePhoneMA

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. 🙂

Mar 11, 2015 11:47 AM in response to WePhoneMA

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"

Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

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