How do I safely clean up "other" in my iPhone 5 memory?

I recently updated my IOS from 7. something to 8.4 and have notice a few issues.

The main issue is that "other" takes up 25.56gb of space on my 64gb phone.

I tried the backup and restore from backup method with no luck. At some point during the restore process, it looks it had solved the problem by cutting "other" to less then half, but then it just goes back.

I also looked to see if there were any apps using a large amount of memory and there were none.

I found a few other issues that I am not sure if they are related having to do with photos/videos.

When I connect my phone to my laptop and instead of using iTunes, I choose "Open device to view files". I would normally do this to move photos from the camera roll to the specific synced folders that I want them in. This time I notices that there were MANY MORE folders listed under "DCIM" that I can ever remember seeing. There were normally 4 or 5. There are now over 30. In addition within some of those folders are what look like phantom Local Disks. They only show as Local Disk and can not be opened, moved, or deleted. Some of the folders have 1 or 2 within them and I have seen as many as 6 within a folder.

I have also found that I had many photos and videos that were corrupt. The videos would not play on the phone and the photos and videos were not recognized by my computer and could not be moved or copied from the phone to the computer. They also could not be sent in a text or email. I had to delete them.

I would love to get some memory back without losing any texts or other important info.

Any help would be greatly appreciated....this is driving me crazy!