Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

SOLUTION! Hallelujah.

I was having a hard time permanently deleting photos in the Photos app for Mac. I deleted them, then went to Recently Deleted, and deleted those. But by Mac still showed that the space was being taken by ~200GB in pictures and videos. The solution for me was to open a Finder window, head to Pictures > Photo Library. I tried going through the folder using Show Package Contents (right click), but even after going through the Masters folder, could not free up the space. I deleted the Photo Library file. Then I Emptied Trash! The next time I opened the Photos app, it told me I did not have a library. I could choose a folder to use as the library, or Create a library. Create New Library. Boom. After my Mac dumped the ~200GB of images, I had freed up the space on my hard drive. Hope this helps!

I am having the same issue since 1st March.
Deleted ~700 photos, 20 videos, 15 apps and removed everything from the 'recently deleted' folder. I have removed my gmail account from my iPhone. Every time I delete things, I go into settings and see that I have a couple of hundred MB again, but within 10 minutes it is back down to 0 without even using the phone.
I have tried deleting all icloud photos, notes etc from my phone.
I pay for 50GB of icloud storage to avoid this problem and now I can't use my phone properly, get annoying pop up messages about storage constantly. It only says that Photos is using the most of my storage (but only 600MB of my phones 16GB).
It is driving me insane. When I plug the iphone into itunes, documents and data seems to be the culprit, but HOW?! WHAT?!

Someone save me.
My phone says I have the latest software 9.2.1 but my itunes wants me to update it. but it says I don't have enough storage to update. catch-22.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8WT3Z0Hals4

follow this link and it explains perfectly how to solve this and get rid of those photos you can't see which then solves your storage problems. I have just done it and it works!

What a waste of time! The procedure you demonstrate is posted in this very thread right below the first post in the thread. The person that you responded to said that the instructions posted solved their problem. A year and a half ago.

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.....

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.

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..

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..

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Each photo will take between 2 MB and 4 MB. So assume an average of 3 MB, multiplying by 1433 works out to 4.3GB. If the photos are in iCloud Photos you can turn on the Optimize feature, which will reduce their size by quite a bit.