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iPhone 6 iOS 10.2:

  • Used iMazing: Selected iPhone Between left sidebar options: Pick “Camera” instead of “Photos” - kinda counterintuitive. Select All / CTRL A Delete from right Menu / or Trash icon buttton.

    • Deleting 7000+ photos took a while. To test if it’s working I closed iMazing and when I got back in as before, was left with 2000 or so.

    • Repeated and mostly gone. For some reason 2/300 were left and would not delete no matter what I tried via iMazing.

  • So deleted it using the Photos App - Selecting from Bottom right to Top left (auto scrolls) and selects all.

    • Delete & then Remove recently deleted.

Now I thought this was done; no pics or videos or anything showing inside photos/ camera roll.

—————

But when I look via

General > iPhone Storage and select the app:

Photos & Camera - 318 MB >

Synced from iTunes Library 70 MB

Shared Photo Stream 248.1 MB

I don’t remember using any of these above.

How can this be cleared out?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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It is likely that a wipe and restore will fix the issue.

As the iPhone is essentially a pocket computer with a simplified and locked down interface it is difficult, at best, to get into the inner workings to apply fixes that are needed to solve a particular problem .

I have found that many issues like this are readily solved by a simple, though tedious, process.

  1. Back up your iPhone via iTunes to your local computer. Give the backup a password so it saves the app passwords already on the iPhone
  2. Go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase all content and settings and wipe the phone
  3. When the phone reboots, plug it back into the computer and restore from the backup you just created.
  4. You will have to now enter AppleID/iCloud passwords to reconnect it to your Apple accounts

You should now see that the space formerly occupied by (deleted) photos and the like is now freed up.

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Thanks a lot for your solution.

I however made a small change to it to make sure that no buffer, ghost photos, old stuff and dirty bytes where carried along with the backup to the iPhone.

Basically what I did was to remove the Photos app from the backup before making the iCloud backup. Of course I made sure that no unsaved photos where left in the camera roll (if you have unsaved photos, save them to your Mac or elsewhere before doing this).

So, the iCloud backup has no Photos information backed-up, so I made sure the fresh install from the backup will carry no ghost photos.

And it worked like charm.

In fact it removed a lot of space from other apps (Facebook, LinkedIn, Mail and others accumulate bytes for ages...).

After reinstalling the iCloud backup in the erased phone, I just re instate the "Save Photos data in the iCloud backup" so the camera roll is saved daily.

This was done in a phone using iOS 16, after trying every method I found (including backdating the phone) to no avail, succesfully removing 4GB of ghost photos.

Hope this can be helpful to others.

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