The Decompression of a Boomer

… to continue with this dumb saga, whew, of my i-Phone memory being all used up with photos and videos, I declared the problem solved when the piconizer arrived in the mail from my super-techno-savvy brother-in-law, Victor.

“Oooo- What’s inside the box?”

Great! Just upload the piconizer app to i-phone, connect gadget to phone like a thumb drive, transfer photos, delete photos on phone, voila!- I’ve freed up storage on my i-Phone. Right? Wrong. I couldn’t download the piconizer app to begin with because my i-Phone didn’t have enough memory, even though I had already deleted scores of photos and videos. Okay … fine. I deleted several apps. Rebooted my phone. 3 times. Still no memory available (in ‘usage’ under settings).

So then, Victor calls… “Did you get the piconizer? How is it working?”

“Uh, yes I did. It’s beautiful.” (Which is was. The piconizer was custom fit inside purple framed packaging like a crown jewel.)

“Are you sure you want to take it out of the package?”

“Did you get it to work?” he asks.

“I don’t have enough memory to download the piconizer app! That’s just bullshit because I’ve been deleting photos and apps like crazy. I’m ready to smash my phone.” (Hey, that’s how type A’s handle stuff like this, when the Universe is screwing with us.)

“Whoa…okay.”

A few minutes later Victor calls me back. “I’ve sent you an email with a link. Go open it.”

It was the link for the Apple search question: “Cannot free up storage space after deleting all photos.” There’s a pretty interesting discussion here about this problem – how comforting to know I have lots of company. Makes me glad I didn’t buy more memory on icloud.

“Okay, Jody. Get your phone ready. We are going to follow the directions on the link, step by step, to delete your (already deleted!) photos.” (Huh?)

Here are the directions contained in the link, which we followed:

First, check the Recently Deleted album in Photos, which is a new feature after iOS 8.1. If it’s empty you may have run into a strange bug, where deleted photos don’t actually get removed. To check for this follow these rather strange instructions:

•Go to Settings/General/Date & Time
•Disable Set Automatically
•Tap on the current date/time and roll it back about 2 years
•Tap <General in the upper left
•Launch the Photos app and go to the Recently Deleted album (even if it says there are 0 photos)
•Is it full of photos? If so, delete them
•Go back to Settings/General/Date & Time and turn Set Automatically back on

In other words, if you were smart, or dumb, enough not to upgrade your operating system past iOS 8.1, then when you delete your photos, they are deleted and you instantly gain memory. But apparently, if you updated beyond 8.1 then when you delete your photos they go to a ‘deleted photo album’ – they aren’t deleted. They sit there for 30 days, still chewing up your memory, until you go to your deleted photo album and delete them. That is, unless your phone contracted that strange bug where deleted photos don’t get deleted. (Try antibiotics?)

Ah … remember the good ol’ days with i-Phones: When you were low on memory, you just deleted photos, and maybe a video or two, and gained the memory back.

Anyway, Victor and I went through the process over the phone step by step. When we got to the deleted photos album sure enough, it was full of photos. 240 photos and 35 videos. “Delete them.” Victor commanded. Dang! I wanted to go back through them one more time and maybe save ones that had been deleted, you know, under extreme duress.

I did actually download a few albums of photos onto my piconizer (okay, with David’s help). Pretty cool. I can carry it with me in its nifty case and anticipate the day I might want to look at those photo albums from 2011, or just stow it away in our buffet drawer thinking I might someday pull it out, attach it to my phone, and see if I can figure out how to look at those photos again. Or maybe carry it with me the next time I see Victor …

There, now you have all the details involving a technologically disinterested Type-A personality embroiled in a picture hoarder i-Phone memory meltdown. Although I’m pretty sure I’m more smart than dumb by not upgrading my operating system.

Am I sounding more technologically savvy yet?

(Maybe just go back to a portable digital camera and a flip phone?)

Tags: cannot free up storage space on i-Phone after deleting all photos, piconizer

This entry was posted on August 20, 2015 at 5:19 pm and is filed under photography, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.