How do I delete updating items on photos?

I’ve been trying to free up storage on my iPhone and deleted a few thousand photos from my photo app. It helped initially but quickly went back to the original amount of storage I had even though I deleted the pictures from my recently deleted. At the bottom of the photo app it says “updating x items” and it’s about the same amount of items as the amount of pictures I deleted, so I was wondering how I could delete these updating items?