You may not be able to tell right away that your iPhone photos — the ones you thought you deleted — haven’t actually been, technically, deleted from your phone. You can manually delete them and go months thinking they’re gone for good.
And then one day you’ll receive that dreaded pop up that clues you in on the fact that your phone is running out of storage. You may no longer be able to take photos anymore. Your phone may run a lot slower than usual. There’s an excellent chance the culprit is all of those photos that still haven’t been properly deleted.
If you are running out of storage on your iPhone, the first thing you should do is go to Settings > General > Usage to find out how much space is available. If the. Photos & Camera app pops up, click on it to see how much data is being used.
If photos is the culprit, it’s time to take action.
According to tech experts: “When you delete a photo on the iPhone it doesn’t actually get deleted. It just gets moved to a special album called Recently Deleted. The logic is fair enough–it’s a safety precaution against accidentally deleting photos you actually want to keep. And if you need to restore a photo or video, that’s most certainly a positive. But the execution could be much better.”
When photos move to the Recently Deleted folder, they stay there for 30 days and are then gone forever. But during those 30 days, they are still taking up valuable storage space on your phone.
The simple solution is to delete photos, then select those photos in the Recently Deleted album, and delete them again. This extra step may be a pain, but it will ensure that your photos are truly deleted and that these images aren’t affecting your storage space.