Storage Space Issue - Help

So, my phone starting telling me that I have no storage space left. When I look at the storage, it says I only have 14MB available (that could be a problem!!!!). The breakdown says I have 16GB is pictures and video. I went in and deleted almost all of the pictures and videos on my phone (which should not matter as I use Google+ Instant Upload to back them all up anyway). However, this does not seem to have freed up the space. Right now I have almost no picutres or videos stored locally, but I am connected to my Google pictures online (Google+ or Picasa or whatever they want to call them these days). It seems to me that even though these are online, they take up the same storage space on my phone. Is this possible? Is there a way to remove the space that these take up on my phone?

As a note, none of the albums are setup to be available offline.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for the help!

I found this on my own... in case anyone else has this problem here is what I did:
First I deselected Google Photos sync in Settings/Accounts
Then I went to my SD Card and the folder Pictures/cashe/com.google.android.googlephotos/download-cache - and I deleted everything in that folder (I had close to 16GB of files in that folder).

Now I would like to find out a way to make my photos accessible from my phone without using the space. I am not sure why it would need to download anything to my phone if I only want to be able to access these photos when I am online... I don't want them available offline, so I see no reason to cache them.