iCloud photos

Are you following the steps here -- http://www.imore.com/how-delete-pictures-and-videos-icloud-photo-library? By the way, your pictures you attempted to post are invisible.

Hi,

Join the club.

I have same problem - happened when I was using still iOS8. Short story really long: I uploaded early August some 1,1GB pictures to iCloud Photo Library sharing them to others. I think right after seeing the pictures available in shared album I deleted everything from All Pictures and offloaded the images to Aperture, deleting them from iCloud Photo Library + also from Recently Deleted album. It wasn't until recently when I wiped out iCloud Photo Library again with everything showing empty as what you have in your screen captures, I noticed the library was still consuming 1,1GB out of iCloud Storage. Yet, I wasn't able to see any images in any of my devices be it iPad, iPhones, laptops.. and at the same time all these devices were showing also 1,1GB data being consumed in the local photo libraries. Even if I deleted the local library, once enabling iCloud again the 1,1GB "ghost images" are downloaded, and yet none of them are still visible anywhere in the Photos app. This is after ensuring Photostream is empty, no albums are shared, no pictures visible in Deleted album, ....

Having checked with Ubuntu the iOS devices and simply via Terminal under OSX the Photos Library, I can clearly see there some hundreds of pictures under 'Masters' -folder + also if I launch sqlite3 and open up some of the main library related tables (table RKVersion or RK* tables) I can see the references of the 400+ pictures and further 'du' command showing 1,1GB data consumed. So everything is pointing to something corrupted in the iCloud Photo Library, and I have now big chunk of data consumed both in iCloud and in all my devices.

I created a ticket for Apple Support and spent a good while explaining the issue to several support agents, followed by senior guys. Naturally we went the long hard way going the annoyingly painstaking basics of "ensuring there are no pictures no albums blaaablaa" anywhere, login to iCloud to ensure it shows no pictures, no albums, nothing in Deleted -album etc... well, after finally figuring out there's an issue indeed, they created a ticket to Apple Engineering to address the underlying issue. Now this is where the fun really started for me. As part of the process Apple wanted me to reset my Apple ID password to a temporary one so Apple Support can access my data for temporary period to investigate the issue. I was fine with that. However to my annoyance also Application Passwords were reset as well, thus rendering all apps and devices not compatible with two step verification. Naturally also legion of iOS devices (4 of them) + three Macs went belly up iCloud services wise. Of course I could have changed at any time the password to re-enable the services, but it's actually quite an annoying job to do when you have several devices, several apps, several services to set up everything again. So, I wanted to to avoid double work and live without Apple ID during the investigations. Ultimately I grew tired of waiting over more than one week for any response from engineering. First Apple Support told Engineering should respond in 48 business hours, then next day, then following day, then they couldn't provide any date. At this stage I decided to say have a nice day to Apple Support and change back the password to old one hopefully avoiding re-configuring the password to all devices, services etc... of course this wasn't possible as Apple remembers past years passwords. Thank you! (though security wise this is , I guess, a good thing). SO, I spent some one or two days setting up all the Apple ID related accounts everywhere with new passwords + generated again a set of Application Passwords for older or non compatible devices, apps. etc.. and regarding to iCloud Photo Library - the issue still exists.

I'm currently trying to fix the issue by myself via disabling the iCloud Photo Library completely (this by the way releases the consumed space right away), waiting for 30 days so that iCloud Library HOPEFULLY is really and truly deleted... and finally I'll setup the library again, this time finding it pristine fresh created and empty from old crud."Let's see".

What really annoys me is that fact Apple Support is pretty useless with anything except very basic issues. Engineering response times aren't any better (still waiting for anyone to update the case or contact me). Waiting 30 days to get rid of the iCloud Photo Library is maddening if end user purposefully wants to start with fresh library. How difficult can it be to have "reset" button somewhere, be it at the hands of Support with clear explanation to end user stating your library, pictures, everything is GONE to ensure end user doesn't later on complain support wiping out the library. OSX Photos library fixing could be developed also further to be able not only to fix local library but also find discrepancies better at local library but also push the fixes to iCloud Photo Library as well.

Anyway, good luck with your case and with Apple Support, in case you try to Apple Support -> Senior Support -> Engineering path as well. Otherwise, enjoy waiting 30 days with iCloud Photo Library disabled, after which hopefully/theoretically/maybe/if you're lucky the iCloud Library might be in clean state once re-enabled.

br,

Petri

Ps. Yes. I did also try changing the clock back to when pictures were deleted + one year earlier, as this has helped some people. Didn't help.

Hi again,

Interesting. I found a fix for my case.

1) Wipe out (again) existing Photos Library.

2) Enable iCloud Photo Library

3) Wait for the stupid 1,1GB of ghost images to download

4) Copy all the 1,1GB images from ~/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters/ somewhere safe

5) Kill all processes accessing /Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Library.apdb

6) Hack the DB a bit, first trying to 'DELETE * FROM RKMaster;" - no success as there was one trigger which couldn't run.. so I dropped this trigger, ran the delete again and created again the trigger (so copy paste the CREATE statement somewhere. Use '.schema rkmaster' to identify the trigger in question

7) Launch Photos and import all the 1,1GB of images

8) Magic is starting to happen in the background as somehow at least in my case the pictures are synced against old pictures in iCloud Photo Library

9) Delete everything once sync is complete.

10) Delete everything from 'Recently Deleted' -album.

And surprisingly iCloud Photo Library is empty. No more 1,1GB data consumed, no more 400+ images downloaded.

[pc]:Photos Library.photoslibrary [userxyz]1$ du -x -d 1 -m |sort -n

0 ./Attachments

0 ./Masks

0 ./Plugins

0 ./Previews

1 ./Masters

1 ./Thumbnails

1 ./resources

9 ./private

12 ./database

20 .

[pc]:Photos Library.photoslibrary [userxyz]$

Zero thanks to Apple non existent support for this one.

br,

P

Hi, Tiammatj!

I've run in to exactly the same probelm as you. I have some gigs of "ghost storage" in my iCloud photo library. When activating the library on my mac, it downloads all those images to the Masters folder inside the Photos Library.photoslibrary, but the Photos app itself tells me I have 0 photos and 0 videos stored in the iCloud photo library. This of course also happens on the iPhone, and I believe iTunes shows the "ghost data" as "other" which after activitaing iCloud photo library accounts for 7,6GB! That's just ridiculous.

Thing is I would like to try out your fix, but I'm a bit lost on exactly where and how to apply the commands you tried to list in the last post. Any chance you could explain and make a quick how-to? Would be much appreciated.