Q: Can not free up storage space after deleting all photo

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.

Thank you for your help. That worked!

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.

Same problems. I use iPhone 5. How to solve this problem?

super cool lawerence !!!  Team apple please take a note of this bug

chers !

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

The missing storage could be data corruption. Restoring iOS should free most of it.

You will have to restore the phone using iTunes, which will update it to iOS 9.3. You will need the latest version of iTunes, which is 12.3.3, and that requires Windows 7 or later or Mac OS X 10.8.5 or later.

If your computer meets these requirements update iTunes to 12.3.3 (http://apple.com/itunes), then connect the phone to your computer. Click on its icon in iTunes and click Back Up Now, then when that finishes click Restore iOS. When the Restore finishes it should restore your backup.

Thanks so much, very kind of you to help.  I'll try that!

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.

That sounds right. If you go to Settings/General/About, how many photos does it say you have?

It says 1,433 but that seems like a low number of photos taking up over 4 GB of space.

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.

Thank you very much.  You sure know your stuff!

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.