iPhone photos not freeing up space when deleted
Written by Toby Osbourn,
Recently I was clearing out some old videos and photos from my iPhone because I was running low on space.
I have everything backed up to my Dropbox account so I was happy to just remove them from the device like I normally do.
Even though I deleted hundreds of images and videos the amount of space used didn’t seem to immediately go down. I put this down to the iPhone needing some time to recalculate free/used space.
A couple of days later and switching the phone off and on and I noticed that it was still reporting an issue with space.
Photos were apparently taking up 3.3Gb of space but when I went into the app it was reporting I had no photos or videos.
What went wrong?
Turns out there is a recently deleted album within the photo app which stores a copy of, you guessed it, all your recently deleted photos and videos!
I am not sure if this is a new(ish) feature I grabbed in a recent update or if it is because I have recently turned off iCloud.
To completely remove photos and videos then you need to;
- Have backups already made should you want them
- Select the photos for deletion from your main photo view
- Delete them
- Visit the “Recently Deleted” album
- Press “Delete All”