iPhone 4 rebuilding photo library and losing photos

I have has the same problem several times with my iPhone 4. My photos on the iPhone have been rebuilt several times, mixing them all up. This happens after I click on the photos app.

This happened several times for me as well. On 3GS and iOS4. I have 2600+ photos/videos.

Got the iPhone 4 today, restored data - same deal. What's totally worse is, now i'm realizing that stuff is MISSING from library. If I go into iMovie to add videos to the project, video I took 2 days ago, shows up. Looking at the same through Photos or Camera app (where you can filter by videos), doesn't!

This is bad. Very BAD.

More info:

No missing videos from two days ago, located them about 7 months back.

I have exactly the same problem. The iTunes restore placed a few photo's in the camera roll, which iTunes correctly backs up but the balance in the Photo Library. Does anyone know how to get iPhoto/iTunes to download from the iphone photo library these pictures, so that I can then ensure I don't loose them. I see lots of third party software offerings but why should I be forced to buy software I'll only use once. Its not right.

Yes my phone did the same thing it rebuilt the libary and i lost about about 250 out of 1215 photos in my phone the more recent pic i have taken with the i phone. i am very upset about it i can never get those pictures back. Come on apple get these issue fixed before releasing new products. seriously this is supposed to be the Mercedes of phones. its not performing like a Mercedes!!@!@!

Photos in your iPhone's Camera Roll should be imported by your computer as with any other digital camera. Do you capture photos with any other digital camera and never import the photos from the camera with your computer?

Although photos in your iPhone's Camera Roll are included with your iPhone's backup, it isn't a good idea to depend on your iPhone's backup or on your iPhone alone for this data, which can be lost or stolen or if a problem develops on the iPhone. Photos in the Camera Roll should be imported by your computer as with any other digital camera.

seriously this is supposed to be the Mercedes of phones. its not performing like a Mercedes!!@!@!

Every Mercedes dealership has a repair shop as with every other vehicle manufacturer dealership which remains full and busy as with all others. Mercedes also includes a warranty and Mercedes dealerships have warranty claims as with every other vehicle dealership.

Don't panic. Your photos are not gone.
When you start shooting, photos are named from 1 to infinity. When you restore your iPhone to factory default (or DFU mode install) and upgrade to iOS 4.0, naming sequence is reseted (even if you restore your settings back) and photos are named back from 1-infinity. Basically your photos in camera roll are now sorted as follow:
iOS4.0 install date -> now -> date of first photo I ever take -> last photo before iOS4.0

So just scroll through Camera roll and you should find your missing photos near top.

iPhone is probably messed up from this situation (gaps between photos or same indexes) and this is reason why library is rebuilded.

To sort this issue out, sync your photos with computer (not via iTunes but with Import photos in Windows or with iPhoto or Image capture on Mac). Choose to erase photos from device. After you do this, camera roll on iPhone will be empty and all your photos will be in your PC/Mac. Now it is the time to sync iPhone with iTunes. Go to Photos tab and Choose "Sync photos from" and choose folder where are your photos located on PC/Mac. After sync there will be one or more photo albums in your Photos app in iPhone and empty Camera roll. When you start taking new photos, they will be placed to the Camera roll.
This should fix problems with rebuilding library, problem with sorting and greatly increase speed of next sync.

Details about importing photos from iPhone to PC/Mac and syncing them back to iPhone via iTunes can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3603

Not user error. The iPhone does this on its own. It kicked in for me after saving a hi-res photo from the hipstamatic app. Rearranged my whole camera roll.

If you're not going to help, please keep your comments to yourself. It's a support forum. I'd suggest this user be banned.

I'm having the exact same issue. After doing a bunch of searching, I think it has to do with either having a large number of photos (over a thousand) stored on the camera roll (seems accurate from this thread) OR saving files to the camera roll from a third party app that may be corrupted and/or conflict with the iPhone's numbering scheme...

I did manage to sync with iPhoto and confirm that thankfully all the photos are there -- hopefully I can wipe it and start over without any problems...

Really simple solution for me.. After syncing my iPhoto Library to the iPhone everything got messed up so I just rebooted the phone and voila! Everything is now fine 🙂

I have had a similar problem. It did not have anything to do with syncing the phone or restoring it. In my case, I had taken quite a few screen shots (i.e., press Home and Power buttons at the same time), perhaps a dozen or more. Then I pressed the Home button, then Photos, and before the Camera Roll contents were displayed, I got a message saying the photo library was rebuilding. When it finished, my photos did not appear to be in any discernible order, and the screen shots I had taken were nowhere to be found. I viewed every thumbnail carefully - they weren't there. My suspicion is that this is a bug involving a camera roll cache of some kind. Perhaps if the cache gets too full, the library cannot update properly? Who knows. It has happened to me four times already, and I have been using my phone for just 5 days.

This is definitely not a user error. This is my second iPhone. I had no similar problem on my 3G.

What you need to do is download touchcopy free trial for Windows/Mac and then run the program, then at the top should be a button for photos, click that then on the left should be photos and albums, right at the bottom should be camera roll, click that then flick down to the recent photos you have added which may be the problem, usually photos added from the internet "save image" then highlight and click "delete selection" once down run photos, it should say rebuilding and then will hopefully not crash :]
Hope this works.

This happened to me a few weeks ago when my phone crashed while taking some pictures.

At first I assumed all the most recent pictures were missing and I was quite upset. But then I looked in the map/location section and they were still all there. I connected my phone and used iphoto to download them all and they came off fine.

I haven't synced with iTunes yet as I'm not convinced it will do anything helpful.

Just glad to know I'm not the only one this has happened to. Cheers.

I just wanted to say thank you SO much!!!!! I thought I had lost about 300 photos taken but really the order was just changed.

This is what I think is happening. I think the phone is renaming the new photos taken with file names (really just img_xxx.jpg) of photos that were deleted in the past. And when it "rebuilt the library" what it was doing was just changing the names of the photos we have taken recently and replacing the names with file names that were once taken up, but since they were deleted are no longer used. And when it rebuilt, these photos got put in that order. Really ***** because there's no option to sort by date taken, and I unfortunately have 2500+ photos taken with this phone (and previous iphones)...

I just had to make sense of why it was doing this. Now Apple, please give us the option to sort by date taken on our iphone or make this stop happening. Everythings out of whack!! Thaaaaaanks.

This just happened to me. I received an inbound text message with a picture. i said "save a copy". i went to camera roll and it said "rebuilding library" and i saw older photos and videos, but the text message image was not there, although i saw my daughter's band concert photos and videos. I went back to text messages, said "save a copy" and when i went back to camera roll, it rebuilt the library again. THIS TIME however, i suddenly had 200 less pictures and all the videos of my daughter's band concert are gone. They are not in "photos" or "camera roll".