iPad storage blues

March 5, 2015 10:45 PM

Daughter's iPad 3 Mini tells me it's got 6.9 gigs of photos on it. I've removed all of them, yet this figure is unchanged. The computer it's backed up to has only 1.7 gigs of photos on it. What gives, and how do I zap this?
posted by Wolof to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Perhaps look in the Recently Deleted photos?
posted by bigtex at 11:04 PM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

If it's not the Deleted Photos, try the settings related to iCloud storage of photos. Make sure everything's appropriately downloaded and backed up, delete the iCloud backup, turn the toggle to back up photos to iCloud off and then on again, back up to iCloud again...I had this problem (and a lot of other people have, per the Apple forums) and I'm not sure precisely what fixed it, but I was eventually able to make the phantom photos go away.
posted by lakeroon at 3:17 AM on March 6, 2015

Every time i have this kind of stupid problem with an iOS device, i just make a backup to the computer right then with itunes, and click restore. If you enable encrypted backups first, you wont even have to re-enter any passwords.

This also works when a lot of your space is being taken up by "other".
posted by emptythought at 4:11 AM on March 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I back up photos with Dropbox instead of iCloud but have been having the same phantom photos problem recently. I turned on iCloud backup (temporarily) per lakeroon's advice, and it appears to have worked, so definitely consider giving that a try. (Thanks, lakeroon!)
posted by cellar door at 4:15 AM on March 6, 2015

Best answer: Use iTunes and iExplorer to have a poke around in there.
posted by flabdablet at 6:19 AM on March 6, 2015

Response by poster: Quick post scriptum — the bloat was 66 videos that not only were not deleted, they were invisible to iTunes and iOS apart from the storage space they were filling. iExplorer revealed them and permitted their deletion.
posted by Wolof at 8:38 PM on March 9, 2015