Help Can't free up space with Google Photos

Google photos store the images in the cloud, so that's what your seeing, they are not residing on the phone.
To double check this, use a file explorer and look for the images in all folders on the phone.

It's simply telling you that it ran it's backup, and there's nothing on your device to remove...
You can't remove what isn't there.
All good.
Device is clean as far as photos.
There is no fix required.
End.

Not sure why it's not deleting them from your phone like it should, I've never tried so honestly don't even know if that function works.

Sign into Google Photo on a laptop/PC, not your phone, and make sure all your pictures/videos etc. are there. If they are then delete them manually from your phone, if you are wary then just do one or two and make sure it's working (but it will).

edit: I mean delete one and re-sync, it should still be on Photos but not your phone. It has always worked for me but it never hurts to make sure

Just curious but approximately just how large is your photo library collection? A few hundred photos? A few thousand? More? If it is just a few thousand it will be quite sizable but at some point you might want to stop fixating on your photos as taking up all your storage memory. Videos will take up a lot of space for instance. Other things to look into is your music/audio library. Another thing to consider is if you've been installing and uninstalling a lot of apps over the years, have you just been using the 'Uninstall' button or have you also been tapping the 'Clear data' button before 'Uninstall'? If the former there's going to be lot of old, unnecessary settings and config files taking up space in the /data partition, the singular place in your phone's internal storage where all your personal data resides.
Also, don't bother wiping the system cache, it has its own dedicated system partition, and it's completely separate from the app caches stored in /data. Clearing the system cache will have no effect at all freeing up space in that user data partition because the system partitions are distinctly kept separate from the user data space. And for the most part, clearing caches, be it the system cache or your app caches, is generally a maintenance issue to address some kind of functional problem. Dumping caches otherwise isn't really even a practical, short term fix to free up space as the apps need their caches to function. You can dump the app caches as often as you wish but they just get rebuilt as soon as the apps are used again.
Maybe try using this 'DiskUsage' app from the Play Store. It can show you a graphical representation of what's on your internal storage memory and maybe you can find some unwanted stuff just taking up space
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.diskusage&hl=en
If you do find some stuff to clear out, try using 'My Files', the basic file manager app Samsung includes as its default file manager. it will be in your App menu. If you need something more capable, take a look at 'File Expert' a third-party file manager app with a really good, extensive feature set.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xcxin.filexpert&hl=en

When complete your backup then is show option for free space for your phone.

simpler said:

No time to talk much tonight but the I have 118 images in Gallery and slightly more in Photos.

Click to expand...

That's a relatively modest number of photos. Just an anecdotal reference point but there just over 2000 images in my DCIM folder, and that's taking up about 1GB of space on my microSD card. Why not just migrate your photo storage folder to your microSD card and then focus on just what is taking up all your S4's internal storage space?

I have the exact same issue with myour Samsung j3. Everything backed up but refuses to free up the device images.
Really! Wonder why Google cant solve it.

My problem is a little bit different. I have uploaded all the pictures in my Gallery app, which came with the phone, to Google Photos. My backup is complete. In the past, all I had to do was click free up space and it would remove the images from the phones internal storage. Now I'm getting the message: "Can't free up space Use free up space when items are backed up and can be removed from your device." Here's the problem: Google Photos at the top of the screen above the pictures shows "Backup complete." Appears to be a bug.