important photos gone forever? / iOS 17.4 bug

Ran into similar issue.

phone was slow and safari was not opening. Rebooted and noticed few of the photos that I have take today are missing.

Removed photos are not available in deleted folder as well.

Is there a way to get the photos back ?

It just happened to me. I had taken about 17 photos and a couple of videos and put them into an album with a name called “Spring Valley“. I noticed my phone became very unresponsive about 30 minutes later and I ended up having to restart the device. After the reboot, I went back in to photos and all 17 of the photos and videos are missing and there is no album by that name. If I go to the function inside of photos and search for Spring Valley, I find the album and it says it has the photos and videos. But if I click on the album from the search, it shows the spring valley folder/album but there are no photos and videos inside of it. I hit the three dots in the top right to try to choose additional actions, nothing happens, there are no options for me to choose.

If I go back into photos and look for the Spring Valley album, it does not exist. The photos I’ve taken are there something strange going on with what looks to be the underlying file structure or index behind the photos application. I truly believe that the photos are probably still on the device, in the memory, but there is some form of corruption in the photo applications data at this point.

I have never seen this happen before other previous iOS, device or version of iOS. This only started after I upgraded to 17.4.

I will also note that the device has had a lot of lag after upgrading to 17.4, such as, a huge delay of screen responsiveness coming from idle. if the screen is off and I tap the screen to get it to come on there is often a 5 to 10 second delay before the screen comes on. Again that last part is unrelated, but the device is definitely not performing the way it was when I purchased it less than a month ago.

Raised an Apple support ticket, customer support reached out. They took the details and phone diagnostics. Will share the updates once there is progress on the ticket

Hi, I’d like to share an important discovery. I found the lost photos when plugging into Mac and then browsing the DCIM folder (I used iFunBox and it was in one of the DCIM subfolders). All the lost photos were there, but for some reason, not linked to iCloud Photo Library.

FYI, I also have had Apple support install a profile on my phone and collect diagnostic data. I could feel this happening again, I had 90 photos which were stuck uploading to iCloud, I managed to airdrop most of the files to my ipad, but some of the files were blurry and wouldn’t airdrop (stuck showing processing). In the files app, I couldn’t see any locations and when I locked my phone, it wouldn’t wake when tapping the screen like it usually does. This and other sluggish behaviour. When I restart, it showed ‘restoring from iCloud’.

As for triggers, it might have something to do with externally mounted accessories, in my case my DJI drone’s remote, or light night to SDCard. Not exactly sure what the trigger is, since I noticed it a few times after the fact.

I feel it is definitely a bug in 17.4.1/ 17.4 and didn’t happen previously.

Image showing file locations missing

Got very similar issue, described in this post: Missing pictures and videos in Photos fro… - Apple Community

(photos are also gone and nowhere to be found).

Also have the 'Files'-app freezing and making phone completely unresponsive and have to do a force restart to be able to use it again.

currently on iOS 17.4.1, iPhone 12

There was a problem with the original 17.4.1. So Apple released an update version, but it had to be installed using iTunes.

finally got the issue sorted.

apple support reached out and collected all the diagnostic logs from my phone. after two weeks support team came back, installed a profile on my phone to do a restore of my photos library and ran restore. This removed all the photos from library which were backup to iCloud and restored all the deleted photos

this also fixed the issue of phone being slow and buggy.

unfortunately they could not find the root cause

if you are still facing the issue. Raise a Apple support ticket and ask them to do a photos library restore

Went to a waterfall in Cornwall, with the wife and our cocker spaniel. Was a bit pricey to get in, so we thought we’d make the most of it. Took lots of photos, had some other people take photos of us, sun was shining, took slow motion videos and 4k videos.

At some point restarted phone because it became slow and unresponsive. Couldn’t even swipe to shut down, I had to ask Siri to restart for me. Even the UI on the shutdown screen was malformed, I have a screenshot ironically but all other photos of that day have disappeared.

No chance of it uploading to iCloud, since this would normally happen at the end of the day. You don’t expect to loose photos you have taken over the last 8 hours to just disappear. Totally unacceptable and would consider moving to android.

Screenshot of malformed shutdown screen:

Apple engineers said they could see other reports, asked if I had ever connected to an SMB share, incidentally I do have one mounted, but didn’t use it that day, but wondered if anyone else had SMB share mounted.

Also referenced if I mounted any external storage.

Your question has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. Please start your own instead of attempting to hijack someone else’s.

Go to Settings/General/iPhone Storage and see how much free storage you have. If it is less than 10% of total storage or 1 GB (whichever is less) there was no storage available to store your photos.

There are many ways of preserving photos and videos. Did you do any of these?

• iCloud photo sync
• Manual iCloud backup
• Automatic nightly iCloud backup
• iTunes backup
• Transfer your photos and videos to your computer via USB cable
• emailed, texted or messaged the items to friends or family
• Sync to Google Photos
• Sync to some other photo archiving service such as Shutterfly
• Sync to Dropbox
• Sync to box.com
• Sync to Microsoft OneDrive
• Sync to Amazon Photos
• back up to Livedrive
• Backup to any other backup or archiving service
• Transfer them to a Flash drive through the lightning port on your iPhone, using a product such as SanDisk 64 GB iXpand Flash Drive Go - Apple

A final option is if you synced your photos to iCloud, you have a Mac, and you use Time Machine to back up your Mac automatically, you can open Time Machine and restore the photo library to an earlier date. To do this on your Mac open Finder, then click on Pictures in the sidebar and launch Time Machine. Go to a time before the photos were deleted and restore

Photos Library.photoslibrary. (If you had ever changed the name of the photo library restore that file instead).

If the answer is no to all of the above your photos are gone forever.

Same thing happened to me today, 03-30-24 on 17.4.1 on an iPhone 13 Pro model MLTY3LL/A with Visible eSIM.

Went to zoo and took many photos and videos. Many of them are gone now. Some really good ones of the kids that I would like to recover!

The whole day, my phone was kinda flaky where I couldn’t get the phone to wake up for about five seconds after pulling it out of my pocket.

Later in the day, I turned my iPhone off and back on again. The photos have disappeared!

I had even posted them to an iCloud Shared Album with friends and family, and they’re gone from there too. They’re not in Recently Deleted. I had posted four pictures to the album and after the restart, only two can be found. Many I didn’t post to the album are missing.

This is ABSOLUTELY crazy. Same thing happened to me. Phone getting unresponsive, couldn’t send photos via WhatsApp, Facebook, shared album or airdrop.

Decided to restart my phone and 100 photos I cared much about in the last two hours were gone and the photos app is stuck at “restoring iCloud Photos…”.

It seems to be a software bug judging how many people on the internet is having the same type of problem. I’ve been with Apple for 10 years now and iOS 17 is being the most unstable OS I’ve ever seen.

Sad that you can’t even rely on your 1200€ phone to store pictures properly. Hopefully they’re still there and it’s just an indexing issue.

iPhone 14 Pro 256Gb here, and 70gb free on the device.

I posted in this thread before, but this has happened to me three more times. The most frustrating part? You can view the photos/videos on your phone, but you can't share them. You can't use an app to sync them with an external source. If you hit the Share button, it will hang on "Preparing" forever. If you use an app like PhotoSync, it will hang at "Transfer Progress 0.0%".

It's mind-boggling that Apple hasn't even acknowledged this. I recorded my daughter's preschool class singing a song this morning, and while I can still watch the video on my phone, I can't send the video from my phone to anyone (Share button), and I can't sync it to my SMB server or to any other cloud service. And when I restart my phone, the video will be lost. So I need to have my wife hold her iPhone in front of my iPhone screen and record while I play the video so we don't lose it.

As massively inconvenient as it would be to switch from the iPhone ecosystem to an Android, my opinion has gone from, "Not worth the hassle" to "I don't see any other option if I want to retain the ability to actually keep my precious photos and videos."

Apple's reputational damage may be limited to whatever small portion of the user base is experiencing this issue, but to those who are experiencing it, Apple is looking worse and worse every day by not acknowledging this or communicating about a pending fix.

I left a comment in this thread about 17.5 but Apple removed it. Maybe thiwill stay if I’m careful with my words.

a factory reset of 17.4.1 and restore of iCloud backup introduces NEW problems. Upgrading to 17.5 does not resolve the new issues. Have only been on it a day so I haven’t seen a recurrence of the photos bug.

I’m getting an an-dr-oid. Tired of not being able to use my phone.