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
172 replies

Apr 19, 2016 12:15 AM in response to Arandora

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.

Apr 25, 2016 12:22 AM in response to MummaDanni

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.

Apr 26, 2016 12:37 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

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?

Jun 1, 2016 1:28 AM in response to Blazez

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.

Sep 22, 2016 10:42 AM in response to WePhoneMA

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.

Oct 2, 2016 6:16 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

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.

Apr 19, 2017 1:50 PM in response to WePhoneMA

Has anyone at all had any success at this?? All i can see on here are people with the exact same problem. I have 64gb and when plugged into my laptop i can see i have 19gb free somewhere, defo not on my phone. I live in Guatemala at the moment and cannot get online help, I went (5hour drive) to the nearest applestore and found out nothing!!! PLease if anyone has any info please pass it on por favor. This has been going for over 6-7months for me....Allan

Apr 19, 2017 2:00 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

PLease please help me Mr Finch.... I have been having the same trouble now for months. I have deleted all my apps, thousands of photos(14000) and videos and stil cannot resolve this issue. Even after a visit(5 hour drive) to my nearest apple store here in Guatemala. I have a iphone 6s 64gb. I take a lot of pictures and pay for extra icloud space but still have less that igb free space even though when i plug and go to itunes on my laptop it says i have 19gb free.....???

Any ideas or help would be truely appreciated...

THanks in advance,

Allan.

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Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

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