Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

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.

Thank you for posting this Lawrence. We have been trying to figure this out on our son's ipad for a while and voila, worked like a charm!

Much appreciated to you and everyone sharing this simple fix.

Cheers.

Mike

I came across this topic after hours and hours trying to find out why my 64 gb Iphone 6 Plus was showing dangerously near full with currently only 4.18gb available but with a huge,and to me unknown, 19.69gb showing in Other on Itunes when I sync. I found what I thought was a solution as previousl;y included in Photos was Camera Roll and Synced from my Iphone, both of which were showing a similar high value on my Iphone. I found out how to remove the Synced from my Iphone amount and expected that to solve the problem. It didn't! It reduced the amount on Itunes to just 3.55gb representing the photos remaining in my Camera Roll. Having found your advice on resetting the date back two years and checking the Recently Deleted folder and finding it empty, I am now back to square one! The other peculiarity now is that although Itunes shows 3.55gb for Photos, my Iphone shows 19.6gb and Other is still 19.69 on Itunes.

As I am on IOS 8.4.1 having held off updating to IOS 9 I think I am now at the position that instead of a factory reset I should grasp the nettle and upgrade to latest IOS 9. Do you agree and do you think this should resolve the storage problem? If I backup my Iphone as it now stands, never having restored from a backup before, will all my settings (Outlook for Email, Calendar, Notes for instance), Apps and Data be resored as is now?

Thanks in anticipation.

Turning off icloud photo library does not work for me unfortunately. I cannot try leaving it of for 30 days since i'm currently woking much with it.

@Arandora iOS 8 or 9 doesn't matter either. I have iOS 9 and also have this problem. I expect that updating to iOS9 does not solve your problem. I did a reset to a new phone/installation and activated icloud and this doesn't work for me.

It does however irritate the crap out of me :-(

It would appear that Itunes is incorrectly reporting memory values. It shows a value of 3.55gb for 5500 photos in the Photos category which is obviously understated whereas my IPhone shows 19.6gb as the value of my Camera Roll. If you add the Photos and Other Categories (19.7gb) together on Itunes that makes more sense as the balance remaining shown on Itunes and my Iphone is about the same.

Yep you need to bite the bullet and backup then recovery mode restore as its been said.

photos arent the only item thats going to hog up space that you marked for deletion either.

no need to setup as new after the backup typically wont include the data in the cache marked for deletion.

this will also help application sliming.

IF youre dead set on setup as new use icloud to get items back at least.

Hi Lawrence,

Even after performing the above steps

i did not find anything in the recently deleted folder. When i right click on Photo/video folder in my computer "DCIM", it shows only 1.51 GB of used space whereas my phone is showing that photos/video occupy 3.8GB of space. I know that i recorded a video of 2 GB few days back and deleted it but it looks like space was not freed after that.

could you please help me recover the free space?

This will work also. I just did it in 5 minutes. Download a free copy of Ifunbox http://www.i-funbox.com/en_download.html

After installing, have your phone jacked into your computer, Ifunbox will reveal your ghost photos still lurking on your phone. Delete them.

Problem solved.

A quick reply from me. After everything else did not do the trick for me I contacted apple support and explained the problem.

they tried some things but that also didn't help. So the ticke was escalated to higher support. They ended up taking over my account (after asking me of course). I had to reset my password so that theye could connect to the account. And after I had turned of photo library everywhere.

afte a day they asked to try it again and I switched on photo library. Suddenly the videos that I thought I deleted (and that were stuck) were back again.

so carefully I deleted the videos one at a time. This time all went well and they were deleted properly.

AFter deleting and and emptying the deleted items they were really (really really) gone and the iCloud data was released.

problem p solved for me.

Before I migrated from many years on PC to the MAC environment I was led to believe that it was all about "IT JUST WORKS". I guess that's in another galaxy. Apple's motto should be changed to "WHY SHOULD WE MAKE IT EASY IF WE CAN MAKE IT COMPLICATED?"

UPGRADE iOS! Upgrading to iOS 10 (from 9) solved the issue for me.

After I upgraded my 5S to iOS10.0.1, I opened Photos. In the Albums view, it said "restoring", with the busy circle icon going round and round. During this process, the number of items in the Recently Deleted album steadily increased until I was back to the 1683 items that I had previously nixed. Again, I permanently deleted these items from the Recently Deleted album. And voila, the available storage went from almost nothing to 6.8 GB.

Thanks Lawrence (Larry?), I'm an experienced PC users but have never worked with Apple products until about six months ago when I decided to go whole-hog and bought an iMac, iPhones, an iPad Pro, and Apple TV.

I'm still having trouble figuring out the big picture, just now starting (barely) to understand the relationship between the Photos Library, Photo Stream, synchronizing, iCloud storage, and iTunes backup. When I called Apple Support about the problem with freeing up space to upgrade my iPhone, I got a long friendly lecture about the importance of having the three standard types of backup, but not a word about how, for example, Photo Stream relates to that, or how the Photo Library relates to my conventional file folders.

Do you, by any chance, have a resource that puts all of this into context? Add Lightroom to the mix, and a bunch of old photo archives on loose hard disks and I really don't know where to start in terms of bringing my collection over to my new Apple cobbler of various devices. I could really use a good overview that doesn't include too much apple jargon.

By the way, I just got Astropad to use with the Apple Pencil and it is incredible. Makes the whole changeover to Apple worthwhile.

Thanks again. First time on this forum but I can tell that you're a valuable resource for a lot of users.

It didn't work for me and to top it off anything I recorded for a period of time isn't in my camera roll, however I found it when I connected my phone to laptop l, itwas in my iPhone external storage! But I need it to be visible on my phone!! Can anyone help???

I'm confused! It was a drop down from iPhone link on my laptop and then it was is folder labelled APPLE I even accidentally pulled out the usb cord and all the pics and vids that had been hiding disappeared so I really confused

Sorry for my lack of technical terms

I tried the one that Mr. Lawrence suggest but unfortunately my photos had been disappeared. I tried a couple of times to get the photos back but it didn't and also even if my photo library is empty, the storage says it have 6.13 gb