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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

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking 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

Mar 3, 2016 10:54 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

Hi Lawrence,

i did post something similar yesterday ......& need desperate help. I did read all your threads (right from last year) of people having a similar Trouble of Ghost space being blocked on Photos which dont even exists.

I tried all the stunts that were suggested,,,....backing the date & time 2 yrs to see any photos left behind in the deleted section...Nothing there. Also deleted all my photos/ videos - every single one of them (even from the deleted folder). and still my storage is showing 746 mb worth of photos & videos.

what else can i do to get my space back ??? since im using just a 16 GB STORAGE iPhone 6S Plus, every time i try to use it....it says not enough storage place. And Mainly becoz of my ghost Storage thats blocking unwanted space in my Iphone.

PLEASE HELP.....

Mar 3, 2016 11:02 PM in response to sheroy

Hi Sheroy,


i encountered the same as you and Lawrence has suggested in his reply on Mar 3rd as follows:


If it's off you will have to restore iOS, as there must be data corruption in your storage. First restore using iTunes and restore your backup when prompted. If the problem recurs you will have to restore and set up as new. The restore will also upgrade iOS to 9.2.1.


i Had no other options but to restore my iPhone but fortunately I did a back up on 29 Feb in which I forgo 4 days of information.


hopefully it works for you with minimal impact.

Mar 4, 2016 12:31 AM in response to tAbbY™

thanks Tabby....

from what i gather from your review & the previous posts by Lawrence.......should i just go ahead & restore my Iphone ?? obviously with a back up to icloud. Would that resolve the situation of this so called ghost storage being freed up ?

i have already the latest 9.2.1 installed long back. Been no good to help me with this ghost storage problem so far...

but ill give it a shot to see if it helps to restore my IOS..

thanks..

Mar 4, 2016 6:09 AM in response to tAbbY™

Hi again Tabby,

i did Manage to reboot my entire phone & reset everything (using the backup to restore of course)...& Voilaaa....its all back to normal. Thank God.!!

so i suppose to summarize for everyone's benefit, if you have this kind of Ghost space jammed up somewhere in your Phone, the only way i feel & it worked for me...is to reset the entire phone to factory settings & then load it back using your Icloud or any other backup method u got to retrieve your Phone data.

Well it worked for me & im sure it would help loads of people looking for a reasonable & doable solution to this issue. I suggest try all the other methods as well which have been discussed above to get rid of this ghost storage, like resetting the date & time to 2 yrs back then checking for deleted photos, deleting all the deleted files already....etc etc...

but at the end my solution worked for me & im sure it would work just fine for you as well..

thanks..

Mar 6, 2016 6:55 AM in response to tAbbY™

Hi all


I too faced similar issue of memory full since 1st or 3rd March 2016. I removed most of my photos and videos and even deleted the few large sized apps and it only freed up to 600+ MB of space, whereas it should have been well over 1 GB. Again within a day it showed Storage Full.


Thought of checking about the issue online and came across few solutions from deleting photos & videos, restore to factory reset.

But came across one post saying that WhatsApp Messenger has released an update (version 2.12.15) and in their what's new they have stated that "Fixed some crashes and an issue that was using a lot of storage space on some iPhones". And many other improvements.


So tried it before doing anything and vola!!! got 2.5 GB free space from Storage Full.


Hope this helps...


P.S: Mine is iPhone 6S 16 GB version 9.2.1, also the same thing happened on my mom's iPhone 5C 8 GB version 9.2.1 from 0 bytes to 600+ MB.

Mar 7, 2016 6:39 AM in response to Baptistan

Baptistan wrote:


Thanks Lawrence, it worked 🙂


However, checking the storage usage for photos & camera, it still says:
Photo Library 200 MB

Shared Photo Stream 2,5 MB


Photo library and photo stream take up some space for data structures. That may account for the numbers you see. Also, did you tap on the entry to see how much of that space is data rather than the application code?

Mar 7, 2016 7:05 AM in response to aeroar

Had the same as Aeroar!
Same issue for a few days, deleting photos etc. only temporarily helped the problem.
My whatsapp updated automatically and boom - 0 bytes to 5GB free storage overnight. No more 'documents and data'!!!
The change log of whatsapp messenger describes that taking up storage space was an issue.

Glad I didn't restore my iPhone!!
- iPhone 6 16GB version 9.2.1.

Mar 25, 2016 3:30 PM in response to PaulCommentary

My wife had the same problem with an iphone 5c with 32 gb. I erased all data/files/photos and it still said i used 24 gb of data. I was successful in using itunes to manually back up the iphone on the computer, erase all data and setting and restart and then restore backup after restarting. Everything reloaded just fine and now it shows only 2.5 gb data used.

Mar 31, 2016 7:28 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

Hi Mr Finch,

I followed your instructions but I don't have a recently deleted album on my iphone 5. I've not been able to do an update for a long time due to the lack of storage and I have a pending update of iOS 8.4.1


Today I have 10mb left of storage from my 16gb storage. I have calculated all the apps size up from the storage settings and am only using 4.9gb so I just have no idea where I can find the missing 11gb to delete!

Would you have any tips? I am not very techy but have searched the internet for answers and yours seems to have helped so many people with similar problems.


thanks in advance!

Simon

Mar 31, 2016 10:08 AM in response to Lawrence Finch

I've read through all the posts ... so much information. Can you give me a simple step by step procedure to clean up space on my phone? My Photos & Camera says 4.2 GB (Photo Library 3.2GB, Synced from iTunes 82.6MB, Photo Stream 903MB, Shared Photo Stream 20.4KB). I've cleaned everything up on my phone and numbers have NOT changed. I have and iPhone 5S, Version 9.3. Thank you.

Apr 4, 2016 10:39 AM in response to WePhoneMA

It took me most of the afternoon to work all the way here from page 1 in this threat. Unfortunately for me nothing works.

I tried the "setting the data back 2 years" a couple of times. I tried the remove data on a mac. i tried a complete reset and remove data from phone (and configure as a new phone). Absolutely nothing works.

Yesterday 1 made some movies on my 6s. The phone tried to upload it to icloud photo library, but that was full pretty quick.

So yesterday evening i copied all the photos and videos from the phone to my pc and removed it all on my phone. I also deleted everything in the deleted items.

Still after this. all photos are gone on the phone. Everything is gone on the mac, and the iPad. But icloud keeps telling me that there is 3,76Gb photostream data there.

When i go to icloud.com --> photos, there is nothing there <aaarrghhh>

When i take a new picture, it is perfectly synchronised between the devices. And visible on all deveces. When i delete that new photo, it is deleted everywhere.

I made a test video. This also is synchronised fine. When i delete it (and remove it from deleted items) the space is cleared on icloud.


So now the icloud photo library tells me that i have 6 photos and 0 video's and that they use 3,8GB icloud storage . . . . . . . .


O. Since i need the space tomorrow. i upgraded my dataplan to the 50GB option. Someone posted that the space was cleared when he did that. But (you guessed it) this also does not work for me.

Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

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