Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Where Is All My iPhone Space???

So recently my work upgraded my iPhone to an iPhone 6.  In preparation for this, I plugged in my old phone and offloaded all of my photos.  I made sure to delete them so the phone was cleaned off (as I always did.   To my amazement though, when going into iTunes, I noticed that there was still about 2Gb of space used up by photos.

I navigated over to Photos on my phone and there was nothing.  I had emptied out all my stuff.  I did a search and something said to turn off photo synching in iTunes.  I remember I had done that a while ago, but checked it and sure enough, it was off.

So, a bit more digging and I discovered that apparently, there is an 'issue' (I call it that, but Apple may call it a feature), where there are deleted files that are hidden and not visible, remaining on your phone.  You cannot see them or find them..... so you think.    Time to have some fun.

If you would like to clean these hidden pictures off of your phone, do the following:

- go to Settings-> General -> Date & Time
- Uncheck "Set Automatically" and then set the date to August 1st, 2014 (I don't know why, its a magical date apparently.

After you have done that, get out of settings and open Photos.  You should now see a bunch of items in the deleted folder. Voila!! Your hidden photos that you have probably already offloaded to your laptop.

I don't know why Apple hides them, but I really wish one of their developers would look at this issue and make the phone do the right thing.  Our phones need space, not things we deleted taking up said space.

All you need to do with the deleted items is go into the folder, touch "Select" and select all items and then click 'Delete' and they will be gone...... Space recovered.  After that, go back to the Date & Time above and turn back on Set Automatically and your date should fix itself.

Enjoy the added space to your phone!
 
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