iPhone 6 Photo Storage Huge & Incorrect

[pajarhead]

My 16GB iphone 6 shows that it is using 1.2GB storage for photos and camera. I deleted the few photos I had on the phone and it continues to show 1.2 GB. How can this be? I have no photos or videos stored in this phone. I only had 10 pictures to start with. Looking in iTunes and clicking on photos under summary it is empty. There are no photos. Looking at the multi-colored bar across the bottom on iTunes it shows audio - photos - apps, etc. When I click on "photos" it shows 54 photos using 1.18GB. This is obviously what is showing up in the phones storage. But where are they and how can I delete them?

I only have a 16GB phone and this 1.2GB of unknown pictures is using a lot of it unnecessarily.

Anyone have any answers?

PS: This is getting worse. I just went back to iTunes. That purple status bar across the bottom now shows 1.23GB of photos. Just a while ago it was 1.18GB. What can be going on here???

Thanks.

 

[pajarhead]

I fixed it. Don't know exactly how it fixed itself, but it did. Here is what I did. I went into settings/iCloud and turned on iCloud Photo Library. It found the only 3 pictures in my phone and uploaded them to the cloud. Important here is that it only found 3 pics. It did not find the 54 pics taking up 1.2GB of space which was the reason for this thread. Now when I go to storage it does not show pics. I guess because they are in the cloud. When I look at iCloud storage it shows only the 3 pics that were uploaded. The other 54 pics and its 1.2GB simply disappeared and that storage has been restored.

I am happy. But if anyone knows what was going on I would like to know. This was driving me nuts.

 

[Furt]

I fixed it. Don't know exactly how it fixed itself, but it did. Here is what I did. I went into settings/iCloud and turned on iCloud Photo Library. It found the only 3 pictures in my phone and uploaded them to the cloud. Important here is that it only found 3 pics. It did not find the 54 pics taking up 1.2GB of space which was the reason for this thread. Now when I go to storage it does not show pics. I guess because they are in the cloud. When I look at iCloud storage it shows only the 3 pics that were uploaded. The other 54 pics and its 1.2GB simply disappeared and that storage has been restored.

I am happy. But if anyone knows what was going on I would like to know. This was driving me nuts.

Did you make sir to clear the recently deleted photos in that album? I've had that problem and deleting them from there cleared up the storage.

Posted via the iMore App for Android

 

[pajarhead]

Yes I cleared that. There were only a dozen pics there. As you can guess, I don't take many pictures.

 

[Flow39]

Yes I cleared that. There were only a dozen pics there. As you can guess, I don't take many pictures.

Maybe try restoring the phone through iTunes if the problem persists

 

[Furt]

Yes I cleared that. There were only a dozen pics there. As you can guess, I don't take many pictures.

That is really weird... Good that it's fixed now, but I'm still interested in how it started.

 

[Brandon Ripley]

Thanks for the post and solution pajarhead. My phone was showing 5.4GB used for only 263 photos and deleting all of them and removing recently deleted still left ~5.4GB used. I tried a factory reset, and it zeroed out the photo storage, but upon restore from iTunes, it went back to 5.4GB.

I tried the same thing you did, turning on iCloud photo storage and it initially said syncing 1200 items! After a few minutes it said syncing 263 items and the photo storage magically went down to 1.2GB.

WTF Apple! Please fix this bug!

But least there is a workaround, thanks pajarhead!

Brandon

 

[lawson381]

I fixed it. Don't know exactly how it fixed itself, but it did. Here is what I did. I went into settings/iCloud and turned on iCloud Photo Library. It found the only 3 pictures in my phone and uploaded them to the cloud. Important here is that it only found 3 pics. It did not find the 54 pics taking up 1.2GB of space which was the reason for this thread. Now when I go to storage it does not show pics. I guess because they are in the cloud. When I look at iCloud storage it shows only the 3 pics that were uploaded. The other 54 pics and its 1.2GB simply disappeared and that storage has been restored.

I am happy. But if anyone knows what was going on I would like to know. This was driving me nuts.

Major shout out this was exactly what I needed to do to remove 2.4 gig of phantom pictures I cannot thank you enough! I have been trying for a week to figure this out and this is exactly what solved my problem!

 

[Hangtime4ever]

Major shout out this was exactly what I needed to do to remove 2.4 gig of phantom pictures I cannot thank you enough! I have been trying for a week to figure this out and this is exactly what solved my problem!

+1 - After visiting several other sites and not finding a resolution, I'm happy to report the solution posted in this thread got rid of 3 plus Gig of non-existent photo storage space on my iPad mini. Thanks!

 

[eckl]

Perhaps you can try the app 'Battery Doctor'. The one with the orange battery icon. There is a clear cache feature that really helped me with this issue. I'm using a 16GB iPhone 6.


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[Spal246]

I have the same bug. 1.8 GB of Photo Library on my Wife's phone, but only 2 photos. Turning on "iCloud Photo Library (Beta)" resulted in an upload of 374 items. Once complete her Photo library shrunk to 353 MB... I can live with that. Thanks for posting this workaround, I've been at this for 3-4 hours and was ready to wipe the phone... Now I can return to normal life. Please fix this Apple!!

 

[AmyOD]

So weird. I have turned off what you turned back on in favor of sending my pics to Google Photos. This is the second time I've had to delete a bunch of pics that I know were not taking up all that space. Suddenly, I've gone from 351MB available to 2.6 GB. you are a genius. Now, doninleave things the same?

 

[jprny]

Change date to 9/1/14 and you will be able to delete these (otherwise inaccessible) deleted photos.

Thanks for the suggestion for fixing this. I was waiting for it to upload 810 photos, but then found this:
https://iphonepilot.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/how-to-clean-incorrect-photos-camera-storage-iphone-6/
It worked right away, and also explains what the problem was.
In case the link gets broken, turn of "automatic" setting of your clock and set your time to September 1st, 2014 (note on the settings page, you just continue rolling back the dates until you get to that one). Then, go to your recently deleted album and you will find all of your pics and be able to delete them.
I'm guessing that's when Apple added this "feature", but since most of us didn't figure it out until our phones were full of deleted photos, they didn't show up as "recently" deleted.