DELETED photos are still not deleted & still remains on iCloud!

[jasonklee]

Thanks man! Hopefully it'll be a easy process.

IF you have the time, can you tell me what they got you to do?

All I was instructed to do was turn off iCloud Photo Library on all my devices and wait up to 3 business days. Make sure to talk to a tier 2 agent. Tier 1 agents have been useless as they suggested rebooting, signing out/in iCloud, and even waiting a week (despite my Masters folder showing supposed deleted photos from two years ago).

I did raise that issue as a potential privacy concern but I was told it probably isn't since those photos are in "limbo."

Good luck.

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

Wow, scary. I'm not sure if I'm experiencing the same issue, but I can see the potential for a lot of damage to be done.

Did you file a bug report?

 

[rijc99]

Giving someone else access to all my photos and account? There has to be a better way.

 

[venividivigor]

Wow, scary. I'm not sure if I'm experiencing the same issue, but I can see the potential for a lot of damage to be done.

Did you file a bug report?

I don't know how 🙁
[doublepost=1453947617][/doublepost]

Giving someone else access to all my photos and account? There has to be a better way.

I know, I'm talking to apple support right now. He's talking to his senior advisor so hopefully it doesn't go that route.

UPDATE:
It didn't, they said the engineers will handle this and they'll contact me in 48 hours. !

 

[rijc99]

well, let's hope they're beyond professional

 

[venividivigor]

Don't worry, you're not the only one...

What I did to clear up my space was the following:

1. I went on iCloud.com and deleted all my photos and videos and emptied the "recently deleted folder" as well.
2. iCloud Photos reported 0 photos and 0 videos.
3. iCloud Photos storage occupied approx 1GB of data...
4. On my windows laptop I installed, iCloud for Windows and asked it to download all my iCloud Photos media.
5. Voila! Most of my invisible and deleted photos were downloaded to my laptop!
6. I then went and uploaded all those deleted photos up to iCloud.com.
7. iCloud Photos now showed all those phantom photos.
8. Deleting those files cleaned up the remaining used space...

Hope this helps you as well!

PS: What I think is happening (or what I think happened in my case) is that this is a bug... If for example I take 10 photos while being outside (no wifi), delete 5 of them and delete them from the "recently deleted folder" as well, when I connect agai to a wifi network, the backup process begins and the phone uploads all of them (all 10) to the iCloud but "hides" the deleted 5 due to a bug... What I did above was "overwriting" the invisible files... Just my 2c...

Apple engineers were able to fix it for me, but then it just started happening to me again!

And your theory is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, 100%! Because these phantom photos stayed in the cloud when I started deleting photos while I wasn't on wifi and they were still trying to upload when they were already permanently deleted. (Broken syncs, yeah)

Your method worked man, I finally tested it out because I didn't want to wait for 2 weeks to get mine repaired again.

My only problem is that I can't upload videos to the website... So I have one phantom video left...

EDIT: Never mind. I found an alternate solution, sending the phantom file to an iOS device will fix it.