{"id":11244,"date":"2015-05-17T12:01:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T16:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=11244"},"modified":"2015-09-08T13:49:10","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T17:49:10","slug":"phantom-iphone-photo-library-storage-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/17\/phantom-iphone-photo-library-storage-usage\/","title":{"rendered":"Phantom iPhone &ldquo;Photo Library&rdquo; Storage Usage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My iPhone has been nearly full for a while now, and I&rsquo;m in the process of switching away from Apple&rsquo;s photo ecosystem, so I have been deactivating various features to free up space. I stopped syncing photos from iTunes to the phone. I deleted shared iCloud photo albums. I turned off Photo Stream. I emptied the Camera Roll using Image Capture. I deleted the contents of the Recently Deleted album. I deleted the contents of Photo Stream from Aperture.<\/p>\r\n<p>At this point, I expected <strong>Settings &#8227; General &#8227; Usage &#8227; Manage Storage<\/strong> to show very little spaced used by <strong>Photos &amp; Camera<\/strong>. In fact, it was still using lots of space, second only to Overcast. <strong>Shared Photo Stream<\/strong> and <strong>Synced from iTunes Library<\/strong> were close to zero, but <strong>Photo Library<\/strong> was using lots of space, even though there were no photos shown in the Photos app.<\/p>\r\n<p>Rebooting the phone did not help. For a third-party app, I could have cleared the data by uninstalling and reinstalling the app, but there doesn&rsquo;t seem to be any way to do this for the built-in apps. Resetting the entire phone and restoring from a backup did not help.<\/p>\r\n<p>I found <a href=\"https:\/\/discussions.apple.com\/thread\/6016604\">several<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/discussions.apple.com\/thread\/6572268\">threads<\/a> in Apple&rsquo;s forums about this issue. An intriguing suggestion was to set the phone&rsquo;s date to the past in order to make old photos reappear in the Recently Deleted album and thus be available for deletion. This didn&rsquo;t help either.<\/p>\r\n<p>I ended up looking around using PhoneView (which <a href=\"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/24\/ios-8-3-blocks-file-managers-and-transfer-utilities\/\">still works<\/a> for photo data) and found two major consumers of space:<\/p>\r\n<ul><li>There were lots of <tt>IMG_[number].JPG.altPath<\/tt> files in year-old <tt>[number]Apple<\/tt> folders in <tt>PhotoData\/Metadata\/DCIM\/<\/tt>.<\/li>\r\n<li>There were some large <tt>[number].ithmb<\/tt> files in <tt>PhotoData\/Thumbnails<\/tt>.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Since I no longer needed any photo data on the phone or in iCloud, it seemed safe to delete these files. Indeed, that seems to have gotten rid of the phantom <strong>Photo Library<\/strong> usage. My phone now has a comfortable amount of free space.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My iPhone has been nearly full for a while now, and I&rsquo;m in the process of switching away from Apple&rsquo;s photo ecosystem, so I have been deactivating various features to free up space. I stopped syncing photos from iTunes to the phone. I deleted shared iCloud photo albums. I turned off Photo Stream. I emptied [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[928,114,131,1142,1268,31,904,1179,450,153,927,174],"class_list":["post-11244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-lightroom","tag-aperture","tag-bug","tag-icloud-photo-library","tag-image-capture","tag-ios","tag-ios-8","tag-phoneview","tag-photostream","tag-photography","tag-photos-app","tag-storage"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11245,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11244\/revisions\/11245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}