Do you have less room on your iDevice then you think you should?  Are you seeing space taken up by a media file that you can’t remove via an iTunes sync?  Do you have weird, grayed-out items in your list of iDevice media files when you look at them in iTunes?  Well, Gear Diary is here to help!  (This comes firmly under the heading of, “Doug screws things up and finds out how to fix them so you don’t have to!”)

I am pretty dang happy with iOS 5 on both my iPhone and my iPad.  But there is some odd behavior that I have been seeing since I upgraded, and I wanted to share with you all what to do about it should it happen to you.

In a nutshell, I’m getting some zombie media files.

“What the heck do you mean by that, Doug?”  Well, it’s pretty simple: for some reason, on my iPad and iPhone, I have ended up with TV show and movie files–both purchased and rental–that show up in iTunes, but don’t appear in the appropriate media app on the device.  For example, I rented an Episode of “Primeval”, watched it, and then (I thought) deleted it.  But then weeks later, when I clicked on the “Movies” item in the left-hand navigation pane in iTunes, it was still there.  Or so iTunes thought.

In other words, in the above, I saw an item for that episode of “Primeval” under the “Rental” category on my iPhone (and weirdly, it was grayed-out).  But when I opened the video app on my iDevice, there was nothing there.

I have also seen this with non-rental TV shows and movies, both on my iPad and my iPhone.  What seems to cause it is when I rent of buy from my iDevice, sync my iDevice to my laptop (in my case, a MacBook Pro running Lion), and then delete it from my laptop.  The expected behavior when you delete an item from you laptop when it exists on your iDevice is that, during the next sync, it asks you if you want to “transfer” it to the laptop and, if you say no, it deletes it from the iDevice.  In my experience, this sometimes gets bolluxed up–I have no idea why.  (It doesn’t seem to happen in the cases where you buy or rent items on your laptop and then transfer them.  Don’t ask me why; I simply have no idea.)

So what you see are zombie files–grayed-out, impossible-to-remove files that you can’t see on your iDevice, but show up in the list of files under iTunes.  WTF is going on?  And more importantly, what do you do?

First, you have to download some kind of file management tool for your iDevice.  For PCs, I suggest iPhoneBrowser; for Macs, I am using an application called iExplorer.  (There is a PC version of iExplorer, if you want that instead.)  This allows you to look at the file system on your iDevice.  Then follow these steps:

1. Tether your iDevice (i.e., plug it in to your laptop or desktop system).
2. Open your iDevice browser (for the purposes of this post, I’ll use iExplorer); you will see your device listed there:
3. 
4. Surf to the directory “Purchases”:
   
5.  As you can see, the directory “Purchases” has a bunch of files.  If the actual media file has been zombified, i.e. your media file is actually still taking up space on the device, you need to find it and delete it.  The only way to find it is to look for a big ol’ file–blah.  (h/t kenthephotoman, who goes through this process in a YouTube video, using a real media file.  The reason I have included the process here is to both give it wider distribution, and because I discovered that you can have phantom zombie files, that is to say, iTunes can think you have files there, but the file itself has been deleted, and all that remains is the .plist and .jpg files–ken doesn’t discuss this particular issue, so I wanted you all to know about it.  See the next step for details.)
6. Sometimes–as in the case in the above image–the actual media file is gone and no longer taking up space, but for some reason iTunes thinks it’s there.  That’s because the .plist and .jpg files are still on your device, for some reason.  What you want to do at this point is find the appropriate .jpg file that corresponds to your zombie file:
   
7. Now you match the .plist file to the .jpg file that you’ve located, and delete the both of them using iExplorer.
   

Bango!  The zombie files cease appearing in iTunes.

Do you run into this problem?  Is your solution different and/or easier than ours?  Let us know below!