How to Fix iPhone Storage Full after Deleting Photos in 3 Ways

iPhone could bring you an excellent digital life, like taking photos and videos via its brilliant camera to retain your moment, or downloading thousands of apps to enjoy the contents in the safest operating system.

After several years, the content would take all of your iPhone storage so you can’t get more new content. Of course, you need to delete something to receive new things. Most people would delete photos and videos because some of them are really necessary.

After taking a long time to preview the old albums and selecting some of them to delete, you could go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage to check the available storage now. You find that there are still several gigabytes of photos and videos but they are actually not on your iPhone. Why does this happen?

If you have the problem that iPhone storage can’t be released after deleting photos on iPhone, the following section will show you how to get rid of the problem and correctly release iPhone storage.

Section 1. How to fix iPhone storage full after deleting photos?

Why you still see photos are using iPhone storage? The reasons might be that you haven’t completely remove them from iPhone or it’s actually a bug. Keep reading to learn how to fix it.

Method 1. Check Recently Deleted

When you delete the pictures in Photos, they would not be removed from iPhone right away but moved into the folder Recently Deleted and saved for up to 30 days.

1. Open Photos app on your iPhone.

2. Select Album at the bottom.

3. Select Recently Deleted to check the photos you just deleted and then delete them again.

There is also a iPhone storage full bug that might cause your deleted photos still be kept on your device. You need to fix the bug in Settings.

1. Go to Settings > General > Date & Time.

2. Disable Set Automatically.

3. Manually set the date back to 1 or 2 years ago.

4. Check your Recently Deleted folder in Photos app again to completely delete the phantom photos.

Don’t forget to reset the date after deleting photos.

Method 2. Restart your iPhone

Some bugs could be easily fixed by rebooting especially the fresh bug. If there is really an unknown bug on your iPhone and it makes iPhone show the wrong information. Simply restart your iPhone and it might be surprisingly fixed.

Press the power button for a few seconds and slide the logo to power off. Wait for a few seconds and then restart your iPhone.

How to check whether it is a bug?
Check iPhone Storage in iTunes. When you connect iPhone to iTunes, it will also show you the storage information on iPhone. If it shows the same storage information as on iPhone, it means the photos are still on iPhone; if it shows more available storage, there might a bug on your iPhone.

Method 3. Update the latest iOS

If a bug has been discovered by Apple, it might be fixed in the next iOS update, so updating iOS might solve the problem.

Go to Settings > General > Software Update to check whether there is an available update.

Sections 2. How to safely release iPhone storage without deleting photos?

In fact, deleting photos is the last way to release your iPhone storage. You spend time taking photos in your daily life and collecting interesting pictures. They should be your precious memory so you should not delete them.

There are several ways to get more storage but not lose anything on your iPhone. Keep reading to know how to do that.

#1 Turn off iCloud Photos

If you have more than one iOS devices, you might have saved photos to iCloud on your other devices like iPad. If you don’t want to receive the photos from other devices, you can simply stop syncing photos between iPhone and iPad.

Go to iPhone Settings > [your profile] > iCloud > Photos to turn off iCloud Photos and then photos would be completely removed from your device and also kept on your other devices.

#2 Optimize iPhone storage

Still want to keep your iCloud photos on iPhone. There is also another way to save space.

Go to iPhone Settings > [your profile] > iCloud > Photos to check Optimize iPhone storage.

This will cause all of the iCloud photos to be saved as thumbnails in Photos app. They would be blurry. It takes several seconds to download the pictures from iCloud every time you tap one picture to preview.

#3 Backup photos to PC

The best way to release storage is always making a backup and then deleting data from iPhone. Your photos could be restored anytime you want.

Use FoneTool and you could easily transfer photos to a computer.

● Select Photos: You could select the photos you want to transfer or select all of them with one click.

● Widely Compatible: It supports the latest iPhone 14/13/12/SE 2022/iPad 8/Air 4, iOS 16/15, and other previous devices and system.

Step 1. Download the installation package by clicking the button below. Get it installed on your computer. Use a lightning cable to connect iPhone.

Step 2. Open FoneTool, click Phone Transfer on the home screen. Go to iPhone to PC and click Start Transfer.

Step 3. Click the “+” icon to add photos from your iPhone.

Step 4. Preview and select the photos from your iPhone and then click OK.

Step 5. Click Start Transfer > Select a path and adjust any settings if needed > Click Transfer to get them to computer.

Now, you can safely delete photos from iPhone.

Conclusion

Deleting photos from iPhone will give you more available space but sometimes it doesn’t solve your problem. If you still get the message iPhone storage full after deleting photos, you can use the solutions in this guide to fix the issue.

Also, you could have better ways to release iPhone storage. Try FoneTool to get your photos to computer and then safely delete them from iPhone. Besides, FoneTool provides "Photo Deduplication" allowing you to delete duplicate photos on your device.

Don’t forget to share this guide to help more people.