Hi guys!

My IPhone 8 says the storage is full even though I keep deleting apps and pictures. This has been going on for 2 weeks.

When I connect it to iTunes, it shows that I have 8GB available. When I try to save the phone on iTunes, it’s says the storage is too full to sync, though.

I keep deleting pictures and nothing changes. I emptied the deleted pictures section. I deleted my browser history.

It says I have around 18Gb of system data and every time I delete something the number just gets bigger instead of the available storage.

I still have ICloud storage available. I’ve turned on/off the phone a few times, doesn’t change anything.

Do you have any idea what i could do ? I can’t even open WhatsApp so it’s been really hard :( thanks !

I’m under iOS 16.3.1 btw.

So, I have a huge dilemma. No matter how many GB of photos and videos I delete, it won’t change my storage space. It’s at like 252GB used out of 256GB.

I need to update my phone to fix the bug or whatever but I need more storage space to do that and I can’t do it.

On top of that, my iCloud backup is failing so it won’t back up my June and July photos but it’s done august ones and the rest of them.

I have an appointment tomorrow at Apple Store but does anyone else here know what to do?

It’s almost my birthday and I’ll want to take photos.

I also can’t really upload them to Dropbox either because it takes so much time and I may need more storage space to do that too.

Any tips??

Edit: I did delete everything in recently deleted, so don’t comment that I should do that like I’m dumb or something

I saved my photos elsewhere so there are 1000s less on my phone yet it still says iCloud can’t backup the most recent 7,000 and I’m deleted much more than that. Thanks!

I've searched the thread but haven't found anything

As the title says. On Wednesday I got the Iphone storage full when I went to take a photo so I backed up everything to my icloud and just deleted it from my phone, but it still says photos take up 40gb of storage even though I only have 300 in my camera roll and my recently deleted is empty - what do I do?

My photos take up lets say 90% of my storage so I went and deleted a bunch and went from 2k photos to having 501 photos. When I go to my iCloud however the GB hasn’t changed and my storage is still full. I tried researching online but the only thing I could find was to set the date on your phone back but that doesn’t work for me. Does anyone know how to help? I have the iPhone 8+ with IOS 15.5

Currently trying to clear up space on my iPhone storage - I’ve deleted all large attachments but it still shows that it’s taking up 12.75GB. When I click Messages it says it’s photos within my messages that are taking up space. But I’ve deleted it all? Anyone have any advice? I’m at wits end with this storage stuff - and I pay $9.99 for iCloud too!

I’ve been trying to free up space on my phone. I just downloaded and deleted years of photos from my iCloud. They disappeared from my iPad as expected, but stubbornly remained on my iPhone.

I turned off iCloud storage in Photos, and eventually the photos did disappear from my library, but iPhone Storage is still showing 12 GB of photos data, with no photos on my device.

Is there any way to force a “cleanup” that will expunge old data? I have restarted it a few times, which seems to have done nothing.

My phone is so full, it’s practically unusable. I suspect it has not been correctly managing photo data for some time.

I’m stumped. Help?

I had over 27,000 photos and videos and they were taking up about 76 gb. So naturally, I started deleting some. I’ve deleted about 6000 photos and videos, literally 2000 of them were videos that were 30 seconds or longer (a lot of saved TikTok’s). I’ve cleaned out my recently deleted, I do this every time I’m done deleting something. But instead of my storage going done, it went up by literally 7 gb. SEVEN. At first I thought I was just imagining things, so I go and delete 1000 photos and videos just to see if it’ll go down and it went up by .48 mb. So from 82. Something to now 83 gb. A few minutes ago I deleted 1000 more photos and videos and it goes down by maybe 400 mb?? I contacted apple support and they told me it’s most definitely a bug and to update to the most recent IOS, which I did but that didn’t help at all. Yes I know I still have a lot of photos so I don’t expect my storage to be down by a lot if at all. I still have a long way to go, but why is my storage going up or when it goes down it’s very little? I’m so confused. Even if I take as much as 3 photos it’ll trigger my storage to go up by a whole gb. Can anyone help ?? Has anyone experienced anything similar?? Also I should add that this was a slow progress of about 3 weeks. It’s now to the point where I can’t do anything. I had to update my iOS through my laptop (as suggested by the Apple advisor)

So I cleared a ton of pics and videos from my iPhone, but the Photos app is still showing like 18GB used. There’s literally no media that big left. Pretty sure it’s cache or something stuck.

Anyone know how to actually clear this out? Super annoying.

I have spent the past few hours deleting hundreds of photos BUT the storage increased from 95GB to 97.58GB even though it should decrease. Two things to clarify:

1. Yes, I have emptied my recycle bin.

2. I don’t want to turn on “optimise storage” as I want to view my photos and videos even with no internet access.

Just need to know why this is happening.

i kept getting notifications about my iCloud storage being full so i went ahead and deleted a lot of pictures off of my camera roll. i went back to check my icloud storage but its still exactly the same. does anyone know a fix to this?? its really annoying bc i need yo download some things

Here's the issue: I have over 600,000 photos on my iPhone and my storage is pretty much full.

Firstly, to explain how we got here: I have OCD which manifests in me taking screenshots of things I see on my phone because I think I will need to remember them later, along with a couple other issues irrelevant to this topic. Over the course of about seven years of taking many screenshots every single day, I think it's safe to say that I now have a maybe a couple more photos on my phone than most people. I have been taking therapy for this personal issue and am getting better, but the phone issue is still present because it appears that the damage has already been done. The steps that I'm taking to get rid of the excess data don't appear to be working.

Over the past couple days, I have gone through and deleted about 10,000 photos off of my phone, after saving them to a flash drive. And I plan to delete more. I log in to my to iCloud account on my laptop and I delete them 1,000 photos at a time. And when I transfer them, it says those thousand photos represent about 2 to 2.5 GB of data. And yet, after deleting what should be over 20 GB over the course of a few days, my phone still says storage full and reads as having only a little over 200 MB left of space. How is this possible?

About an hour ago, my iPhone read that I have 127.71 of 128 GB of space. After I deleted 2,000 more photos just now, my phone now reads as having 127.74 of 128 GB. I didn't download anything or take any more screenshots in the meantime, yet my phone is registering as having less data than it had before I deleted things. How is my phone still full when I have now deleted 12,000 photos? Obviously there's a lot more data to remove, but these deleted photos should account for at least some improvement, right? How is this possible?

Looking at my phone, it reads as having about 652,000 photos, while my iCloud account, when opened on another device, reads as having about 640,000 photos. Oh. So that's how that's possible.

I have tried to delete photos directly from the iPhone photos app, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to work. I would like to free up space while, ideally, not actually losing any data (hence saving the photos to a flash drive) so is there a way I could do this? Could I de-sync my iCloud account with my phone? If I wait, will the phone catch up to the fact that I deleted things from the cloud? How long should that take? What would happen if I deleted the photos app off my phone? Would that be a temporary solution?

Alongside deleting photos, I also deleted some apps I wasn't using, but they didn't have much impact because the photos are obviously taking up the most space. I have turned my phone off and on again a couple times and have it charging but it hasn't seemed to help. What should I do? Can anyone help with this?

Obviously, my next step is to contact Apple directly and see if they can help, but I wanted to see if there was anything I could do myself to resolve this issue.

Edit: It turns out that my iPhone hasn't been updating. My iPhone 14 is still on iOS 1.17.1. I didn't realize this because I have automatic updates turned on and I expected that to take care of it.

tl;dr I can't update the phone because I don't have enough storage space for the updates and I can't free up space because the photos app isn't working because the phone hasn't been updated, so it isn't working properly. Does anyone have any advice?

Final Edit:

I have resolved this issue.

After much googling, I discovered that, apparently, if you connect your iPhone up to a mac, the storage space of the computer allows the phone to update without requiring as much storage. My phone required 7.5 GB to update, but with the mac connected, I only needed 1.3 GB of free space. I had to delete my two most data consuming apps (both below 1 GB) because the photos wouldn't sync up to iCloud and couldn't be deleted off the iPhone. I easily redownloaded those apps with no loss of data after the phone updated.

Now that my phone has been updated, the iCloud and iPhone photos have synced up and I have the 20 GB of free space on my phone as a result of deleting those photos. The photos app is working as it should. Everything is working smoothly now.

I will continue to delete more photos, and I will be sure to update my phone in the future to prevent this issue from happening again.