Weird iPhone Storage Issue: 160 GB Used for Photos, But I Only Have 45 GB of Actual Images

[hensse]

Hi everyone,​

Hi all,

I’ve been struggling with a very strange storage issue on my iPhone 15 Pro - and I’ve seen the same behavior on previous iPhones as well (I first noticed it with the iPhone 8).

Right now, I only have around 5,500 photos on my phone. Over the past few months, I’ve done a serious cleanup:

• Deleted duplicates and unnecessary photos
• Emptied the Recently Deleted folder completely

I also transferred all remaining photos to my computer, and the actual uncompressed size is only about 45 GB.


However, when I go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, the phone claims that the Photos app is using 160 GB.
That’s a massive discrepancy -over 110 GB of so-called “ghost” photo data that I can’t locate or delete!


As mentioned, this isn’t new for me. I’ve encountered the same issue with multiple devices. The only two "solutions" that ever worked were:

• Completely erasing the iPhone and setting it up as new (even restoring from backup brought back the bloat!)
• Or buying a completely new iPhone

Both options are incredibly time-consuming - and frankly unacceptable for a premium device.

My theory:​

I often browse shared albums from other iOS users. I suspect these images get cached locally, but don’t show up in the Photos app - and I can’t delete them.


Alternatively, is iOS storing some kind of hidden cache, previews, or RAW duplicates that bloat the Photos storage to this extreme?


Has anyone else run into this?
Better yet: does anyone have a reliable fix?

 

[shibboleth]

I found another thread that seems to deal with the same issue, but at IOS 15: Issue with iPhone Photos storage; however, it seems to still lay unresolved. That does confirm your observations of this being an issue going back to at least the iPhone 8 though.

I don't suppose it'll be of much help, but I'll give you a cursory suggestion to check your hidden photos file. Do you do a lot of photo editing or video recording on the phone? Have you tried upgrading the OS... maybe that'd refresh it?