iPhone 5S Showing 12GB used, only 4gb actually used. Help Please!

[MattAKramer]

My phone is telling me that I'm out of storage. It is showing that I have 12gb used but when I added every single app and their amount of storage being used, I get roughly 4.1gb. Where are the other 8gb coming from? Also it says that I have 660MB used by photos, yet I only have 3 images, nothing in my recently deleted or shared albums.

Within the last 24 hours I've gone from having 1.2gb available to zero, and I've deleted lots of apps, podcats etc. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Edit: I have a 16gb 5s and realize roughly 4gb of that goes to the OS, but not understanding where the other 8gb of usuable storage went.

 

[Cmd-Z]

If you connect to iTunes you might see a large "Other" which seems to be a misc. category where a lot of cruft accumulates. Do a backup, restore, then reload the backup ... you'll probably fix a lot of this.

 

[MattAKramer]

If you connect to iTunes you might see a large "Other" which seems to be a misc. category where a lot of cruft accumulates. Do a backup, restore, then reload the backup ... you'll probably fix a lot of this.

Somehow the phone randomly fixed itself today before I could try what you recommended. It still shows 600+MB being used by photos with only having three photos on the phone and nothing in recently deleted. Any way to fix this?