IPad available memory NOT consistent with available memory shown in iTunes and available memory reduced after a connected sync...doesn't make sense.

Question

I was looking through my pictures on iPhoto on my iPad 2 and noticed in some of my albums there were duplicate pictures, but on iPhoto on my iMac there wasn't. I had also noticed that my 64GB iPad 2 had only a little over 14GB left for available memory. I decided to connect my iPad2 to my iMac and sync it with itunes but this time I unchecked Sync Photos. I was asked to remove photos which I agreed to. My intnet was to re-install my photos in hopes that I would no longer see the duplicate photos and quite possibly free up some memory. In short, none of that worked and instead the pictures remained on my iPad2 and my available memory jumped to 956MB. I then tried selecting a " Selected Events, Faces, Albums..." in the Photo section of iTunes but I did not select any albums or events or faces. The sync ended and I still had all of the pictures on my iPad2 with 7GB left of available memory showing on my iPad2 but now showing 12GB on my iTunes on the iMac.
I then tried to do a sync again, syncing all photos and the sync cancelled. I tried it again and it went through. This sync ended with 14GB of available memory showing on iTunes on my iMac, BUT on my iPad2 it showed 7.1GB.
None of this makes any sense. I guess I could have left it alone and viewed duplicate photos but if duplicate photos were causing available memory to be reduced, I wanted the memory to come back up for future use.
Also, I noticed that the amount of photos being synced has randomly changed on a couple of these occassions as if I had more or less photos to sync and I haven't. I'm not sure what would cause this either.
Where it says "Other" in the memory bar in ITunes on my iMac is 26.34 GB. Before I did the first sync it was a little over 7GB. What would cause the "Other" to consume so much memory? and what is "Other" Why did it fluctuate so drastically when I've made no changes to my iPad?
I hope I can get some help to this.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Brock_DB wrote:
Where it says "Other" in the memory bar in ITunes on my iMac is 26.34 GB. Before I did the first sync it was a little over 7GB. What would cause the "Other" to consume so much memory? and what is "Other" Why did it fluctuate so drastically when I've made no changes to my iPad?
"Other" can be the cause of this storage capacity snafu that you have going on with your iPad. "Other" is pretty much what it sounds like it should be with regard to what is stored on your iPad. It is "stuff" associated with apps but not the apps themselves or any other media. It consists of Safari Bookmarks and history, Notes, text messages, email messages, contacts, photos associated with contacts and items of that nature. It should not be anywhere near 26 GB and the fact that you have much is a little bit of a problem.
Sometimes the only way to rid your device of that bloated "other" is by restoring as a new device without using the backup. There could be something corrupt on your iPad and if you restore from a corrupted backup, you will just end up back where you started. Also, sometimes this issue is caused by syncing photos and while I don't know this for a fact, it might have something to do with the metadata associated with the photos that gets corrupted and then that might cause this "other" storage problem.
Take a look at some of these and see if something in one of them helps.
https://www.google.com/search?q=What%20is%20%22Other%22%20on%20my%20iPad%20and%2 0how%20do%20I%20get%20rid%20of%20it?#q=What%20is%20%22Other%22%20on%20my%20iPad% 20and%20how%20do%20I%20get%20rid%20of%20it%3F