IOS – used storage in iPhone 5

apparently the "recently deleted"-feature in iOS8 is broken. Photos you've deleted don't disappear after 30 days, they're just hidden on your device. The storage being used isn't "phantom usage", since the photos are still safely stored. The easiest short term solution is to set back your date on the phone month by month (until the release of iOS8), and your deleted photos will reappear in the "recently deleted"-folder. There you can manually and permanently delete them.

As long you regularly delete all "recently deleted" images, your storage won't clog up.

If you want to get an overview of the photos on your iphone just download iexplorer. There you'll see all of them, even those you can't see on your iphone.

Here's a blog post about the issue: https://blog.tmoehle.de/ios-photo-problem/

Cheers,

This may have been caused by a bug in iOS 8. I had the same problem and just now solved it by doing the following:

1. Go to Settings, then General, then Date & Time.
   2. Untoggle "Set Automatically". (We'll toggle it on again in the end.)
   3. Set the time several months back in time. I set it a year back.
   4. Go to the Photos app. The Recently Deleted album will still say that it has 0 photos, but if you actually open it, you may see that there are actually many in there! You can then click "delete all" and you will have cleared up that space.
   5. You can now go to Usage in settings to see that space has been cleared up. If there is still some, try setting the time back and forward and see if you discover more photos in the Recently Deleted album.

That worked for me. I cleared up 8GB of "deleted" hidden photos.