Recover lost photos on iPhone

Actually I just got back from Hawaii and tried to upload the photos on my computer. Well I had to do the update before I could upload the photos, so I did, and it muffed up my iPhone and told me I had to restore it to factory settings. Well I lost 300+ great pics from vacation. Not to mention some contacts as well. Double bummer, because my phone was working absolutely fine until this update and I dont think I needed it. Now I've lost a bunch of valuable pictures. Im ******!

Same problem here. We just got back from vacation, the iphone needed an update, then went into recovery and we lost all our vacation pictures. Even my PalmPilot from 8 years ago use to sync up before updating!!

Unfortunately there is no way to recover pictures lost from the iPhone. You are given the option to sync with iPhoto or a photo managing software every time you sync. iTunes doesn't take care of photos.

I also could not download my photos from the iPhone, so I updated and the process stopped and said I had to "restore" and I lost all my 150+ of photos on the phone. I never used any 3rd party software or hacks or anything!!! I can't believe apple let's out an update that is this unstable. Really put a turd in my punchbowl. Thanks. Not even another 100 dollar credit fixes that.

If I can save just one photo...

*disconnect from the web* before you download
or sync your iphone. / photos

I do this just to avoid the download, no hacks
I have just read a few horror stories
and my iPhone works great, so I'm holding off for now
best .x.

My girlfriend's iPhone also went into forced recovery mode and all pictures were lost. The worst thing is that there were photos of her with Brian Adams and it was dream of her life to meet him.
I tried every possible way to restore those pics but nothing works (even professional recovery company). Many different programs claim to recover lost files from hard drives or even iPods but nothing works with iPhone.
Reason: iPhone doesn't show up as external storage device in Windows therefore those programs cannot access it.
It seems to me that Apple purposely blocked access to iPhone's storage to keep people from messing with its internals but as we all know this doesn't really work...

Apple!!! Listen!!! It is to easy to loose all data on iPhone during updates!!!

My previous Blackberrys always backed up automatically before updating. That way - if there was an error - nothing was lost.

One would hope that Apple would learn from users' experiences.

i find it COMPLETELY irresponsible on Apple's part to make it so difficult to recover lost data on the iPhone ..

all i did was plug in my iPhone to iTunes and immediately got the "recover iPhone message" and lost everything .. notes, contacts, pictures .. ironically i had connected because i hadn't backed up my data in a month (i do monthly backups)

i still managed to get screwed and more and more i'm becoming discontent with how high and mighty apple has acted with the iPhone .. AT LEAST let us see the phone as a hard drive so that some kinda recovery would be possible .. i thought my situation was bad just losing ideas i had on the notepad and pictures of me and my girlfriend over the last month .. but losing vacation photos? i'd be absolutely furious that there wasn't a possible workaround and it's mostly because apple has been so difficult allowing 3rd party access and user hard drive access (which they provided all these years for the ipods so you could potentially perform data recovery)

apple's really dropped the ball here and this frustration is ridiculous and could have been easily avoided if they provided a more user-friendly product .. i fully expect apple to provide hard drive access in the future and all these problems would be gone

As of this week, there is a way to recover your photos trapped on the iPhone:

http://ecamm.com/mac/iphonedrive

Bad news is the pictures stored on the phone are not full size. They have been scaled down to 640x480.

Thanks,
Glen

But this only works if you do not recover your iPhone, correct? I and everyone else on this thread are looking for a way to recover photos after the iPhone recovery happens. Will this software let you do this?

For the recored, I had the same problem - lost almost 300 photos yesterday. I hadn't connected my iphone in over a month and when itunes prompted to install the 1.1.1 update yesterday I did - thinking that it would be as flawless as the past 2 updates. I was forced to restore and even had a problem getting that to work. I'm pretty sure that the reason the update failed was that I plugged my phone into the front USB 1.1 ports - not the USB 2.0 ports on the back. The restore failed with the "iphone could not be restored an unknown error occured (6)" until I connected the iphone to the USB 2.0 ports. I agree with the other post that Apple should force a sync before updating the software. And it would be nice to include the Pictures (and Notes for that matter) in the sync also rather than having to remember to do it manually. At least Apple should give the user the option to automatically sync.

well, hopefully I'm not totally lost YET. My restore kept failing and I never did get it to go successfully. Looks like iPhone drive would work but I don't own a Mac... Question is will it work with a phone in recovery mode...

Bad news - the software from ecamm does not work with an iPhone already in recovery mode. I tried. Their tech's did not think it would either.

I also tried touchcopy - which is a PC based program similar to iDrive.

I DID talk to a hard drive recovery company that thought they could do it for $750-$1500. Ouch - debatable if the photos are worth that. I'm leaning no.

I'll keep looking. There is another software that isn't realeased yet here

http://www.dvdtoiphoneconverter.net/iphone-data-recovery-software.html#

Not sure when but hoping maybe that will work - I'll hold off "restoring" (deleting) my files as long as I can.

I'm in a similar boat. When updating there was an error and I had to do a restore. I did sync my phone but did not sync any of the photos. I had taken a couple "first times" of my son which all got erased as the gallery was deleted during the restore/update.

When I finally did updated I noticed that my wallpaper was still a photo I had taken with my phone along with several contacts still using photos that were all in my original "phone gallery."

I still have several photos somewhere locked in my phone but how can I access them? Any way to connect to the file structure and pull the image used as a wallpaper and images for the caller id?