Clearing Your iPhone Photo Cache and Clearing Some Space

If you are one of those folks who decided not to wait to get the latest stock of the iPhone 6 or the iPhone 6+ with 64Gb and 128Gb, and you are forced to restore your data from a larger capacity phone to a smaller one, space may be the key to having a smooth recovery and being able to live with the iPhone 6/6+ 16Gb variant.

When Apple released iOS 8, the camera roll which a lot of users were so familiar with disappeared. This caused an uproar in the user community that in iOS 8.1, Apple brought back the camera roll and also included a “Recently Deleted” section in case you accidentally pressed delete to some photo.

iPhone_Photo_Cache_1

Now recently a guy managed to restore over his data from his iPhone 5s to the iPhone 6+ 16Gb but was running out of space.

Firstly, he backed up all his photos into his PC and deleted all of the photos in his camera roll.

Secondly, he then selected the “Recently Deleted” folder in the Photos app, click on “Select” at the top right of the screen and then press “Delete All” at the bottom left to clear up all of the space.

Thirdly, now his camera roll should show zero photos.

Fourthly, select Settings > General > Usage > Manage Storage > Photos & Camera

The Photo Library should show 0 data usage.

In this case, there was a bug where the Photo Library still showed 3.1Gb of space used.

The cause of this is highly likely there is a photo cache on the iPhone and both the menu items and iTunes can’t access it.

After searching through the web for 2 days, I finally found an app called iFunBox which enables you to access the directories in your iPhone and using this app, I was able to remove all the photos from the cache and free up the space I needed.

When I finished deleting all of the photos in the cache, the iPhone then showed that the Photo Library is now 0Gb. Good thing about this solution is that iFunBox is still free as compared to some other apps which I paid for and it still didn’t work (apps such as PhoneClean).

Why this happens I have absolutely no idea but I can probably guess that after years of restoring and setting up your new iPhone may have created this situation.

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