Photos in iMessage disappeared after ios13 update

Just a suggestion which you may have already tried, but on my phone if I click on the info icon at the top and scroll to the bottom it says x number of images in iCloud and there is an option to download them. Hope this helps

Hi,

I am happy to report that it seems my photos are now showing up.

This is the fix:

1) backup to iCloud

2) connect phone to computer

3) create iTunes backup (if you wish)

4) restore iPhone software (this will wipe the OS and completely reinstall 13.2)

5) go through initial setup and restore from iCloud backup.

6) let the phone do it’s thing and make sure you’re Connected to power and leave it.

7) after 24 hours I still did have have all my pictures. I rebooted. This was the first reboot post recovery.

the pictures I have started to show up.

I followed these instructions posted by @th1ef and my pics are finally showing up. I've added a few notes.

This is the fix:

1) backup to iCloud

2) connect phone to computer

3) create iTunes backup (if you wish) (....I did a backup to my Mac using Finder)

4) restore iPhone software (this will wipe the OS and completely reinstall 13.2) (....I also did the restore through Finder)

5) go through initial setup and restore from iCloud backup. (....Restoring from iCloud backup did not work for me. I restored from the backup stored on my Mac and it worked)

6) let the phone do it’s thing and make sure you’re connected to power and leave it.

7) after 24 hours I still did not have all my pictures. I rebooted. This was the first reboot post recovery. The pictures I have started to show up. (....I did not require a reboot)

Here are the steps I took:

1. Plugged phone into Mac
2. Backed up phone through Finder (or iTunes) by hitting the Back Up Now button. (I had also forced a backup to iCloud right beforehand to be sure I had two current backups)
3. After backup, I selected the Restore iPhone button in the Finder window
4. I received a message that a newer version of iOS was available and selected yes to download it before the restore (my phone was already running the news iOS but I’m assuming it was downloading a local copy to my Mac)
5. After the download of iOS and the restore were complete, I selected Restore Backup in the Finder window and then selected my current backup (phone plugged into Mac this whole time)
6. I left the phone plugged into my Mac through the full Restore Backup process but could see pretty quickly that my Messages details were indexing properly. I left it plugged in until the next morning when I could see all indexing was complete

No OTA updates/restores/backups worked for me. The indexing only occurred properly when I did a full restore/backup using only my Mac. 

So I think I have a FIX!!! My phone and my wife's phone has this problem of not be able to see photos under info within imessage. When I was talking to apple support she said that for imessage to restore right you needed to plugged in to power. So for my wife's phone we got her a new iphone 11 so to set it up I did a icloud backup with here current phone that was not working right. Then just set up the new iphone 11 with manually setup but still restoring from icloud with the newest backup but always having plugged into power. Gave it all night and all was back to normal the next morning. My phone is the new 12 and it is have the problem I did about the same thing just without switching phones. Do a icloud backup (turned off find my phone but do not know if you need to do that) then reset the phone so it deletes everything on the phone. Then had the phone plugged into power and restored from that new backup. Just make sure you have the phone on wifi and power until it fully restores. It will take hours. I hope this helps someone else and if so let us know on here.

Hi Everyone-

I'm literally in shock right now because I've fixed this problem on my iPhone 11 (running iOS14.3). I have struggled with this (talked to Apple senior tech support/forwarding the issue to engineers, etc.) since updating to iOS13 and have stalked this forum as well as the internet in general to find a fix. Nothing that anyone has posted here has worked for me (even getting a new phone and setting it up as new) and I've really sort of accepted that I'll never get those photos back into "info" where I can easily access them. Anyway, I literally just happy cried and here's the fix that worked for me. It's super simple and I've done many variations of this over the past year but nothing has worked... this time with this combination of actions, it worked. I'll try to include everything, even things that may not have helped. Also, I have an iPhone 11.

1. Update my Mac to Catalina (no idea if this mattered, but it may have)
2. Update my phone to iOS 14.3
3. Go into Settings - iCloud - Messages - TOGGLE OFF (you'll get that annoying message about disabling and downloading that never actually works, click Disable and Download)
4. Hard reset phone (hold down power + volume up, when settings appear, hold down the X for 30 seconds)
5. Power off phone (hold down power + volume up, slide to power off phone)
6. Power phone on
7. Go into Settings - iCloud - Messages - TOGGLE ON
8. CHECK YOUR INFO SECTIONS (mine were there immediately, didn't have to wait)

I did all of this while my phone was plugged into my computer via USB. I know this sounds incredible basic, but I've never turned the phone off/done a hard reset between toggling the Messages "OFF" then "ON" in iCloud so maybe that made the difference? Anyway, I really hope this works for someone else because I've been on this board for over a year at this point and if someone else can benefit from this, it would make me so happy!

With the help of a couple great Apple Support folks, we were able to get to the bottom of this. While unfortunate and a bit time consuming we were able to get to the bottom of this. Quickest thing to say is somewhere between moving to a new phone and backup restore...the photos were there but indexing was all jacked up. Before you undertake any of this, BACKUP.

This, for me, was solved by completely deleting the contents of my phone and setting up my phone as NEW. Then when I signed into my iCloud accounts all my usual stuff came back Photos, Calendar, Mail, etc... including my Message. I had A LOT of photos in my messages. This completed "downloading" on Wifi in a day. The long wait was for the "indexing" to wrap up... I mean like 3 days. But in the end it's all back and where it needed to be. Nothing was really ever lost.

Setting up my iPhone from scratch was a huge pain, but in the end probably will be good for me. Lots of apps I don't really need. I've only install apps I use/need since this episode which so far has eliminated about 100 apps from my phone. Still sucks this happened, but Support was great. I would advise anyone to actually call in if you want help resolving this. I hope this helps.

I got my pictures back! I had to restore my software, it was a pain but I’m happy my pictures are finally indexing. The solution is to back phone to iTunes, restore you software and you phone will restart then restore from iTunes to get all the data

Complete run around with the Senior Apple Support person. Stated my issue was sent to an Engineer. She called back today, going through the SAME steps we took three days ago with troubleshooting. Low and behold I noticed an update was available as of today. She said “oh yeah, try that and I’ll call you back tomorrow”. I just updated to 13.2.2 and my iMessages photos are back, all 5 GB of them.

I backed up my phone to my phone to my computer, reset my phone, then tried restoring from an iCloud backup, which only made messages worse. I actually got an iMessage error and no messages displayed.

I did a hard reset again, then restored from the backup on my computer. It took ages to restore (I rarely delete messages) and then took longer once the computer restore was done to finish downloading everything from the cloud, but eventually everything (all pictures and attachments) reappeared.

You have already done to many things that could have interrupted the indexing process.

After restoring your backup you need to wait and nothing more. Don’t click download and log in and out of icloud, reboot etc. These all can interrupt the index process.

here are you options at this point:

1) wait 24-48hours and see if they appear. Make sure you are connected to ac power and wifi during this time

2) start over: restore 13.2.2 again, then restore your backup to the device and just wait, no need to click download or anything else that you did. It is normal for nothing to show up for at least 12-24 hours after you restore your backup on the device.

choose your own adventure from above.

Hi,

I have 52GB in iCloud but 56GB photos stored on the phone...

I do recall when I initially updated to 13.0 from 12 I did have issues syncing photos from cloud to the phone, it took forever and kept stopping after every few hundred photos. That seems like it was resolved in a subsequent update.

Chakra675 I am going to be honest with you and you will need to try this. First of all, check Settings > iCloud and you should see all your photos in the cloud as well as your messages (I believe it was around 80GB). If you see that iCloud has all your photos you should be find to reset and restore the phone to the latest 13.2.3 update.

I believe in restoring your phone you will get all your photos re-downloaded from the cloud to the photos app. This also may resolve your indexing. I did reboot my phone during indexing and it's possible I interrupted it. Which is why i lost photos in my Messages app when updating from 13.2.2 to 12.2.3. I did another reset last night and have left the phone connected to power undisturbed.

You are currently worried about backing up your phone locally top your computer but what is the point? If not all the data has been downloaded to your phone what is the sense in making a incomplete backup?

You can login on icloud.com and verify your photos are in the cloud. The Photos are stored in the cloud regardless if your phone has partially downloaded or not, they are still there (unless you have explicitly deleted any photos on your phone, this would have sent the DELETE command to the iCloud server and would have removed them there)

However if they have just never shown up and did not download properly to begin with then they should still be there.

Think of it this way. You have a iPhone + Mac + iPad. All 3 devices are looking at the cloud to see whats there. If one device fails to properly download all the photos from the get-go the other 2 devices will still see them in the cloud untouched.

My suggestion to you is that:

If you have iCloud Photos + iCloud Messages Enabled the Photos/Messages are stored OUTSIDE of your iCloud Backup then you have nothing to worry about.

You have to remember your iCloud is broken down in different ways, think of it like Folders stored in the cloud and your device reaches out to these folders:

1. iCloud Backup - Settings / App Settings / App Data
2. iCloud Photos - Photo App Data
3. iCloud Messages - All Messages Data + Attachments
4. Health Data
5. Contacts
6. Mail
7. Notes
8. Calendars
9. News
10. Home
11. Safari

When you have iCloud Photos + Messages Enabled these are both stored in Separate "folders" in the cloud and kept outside of the "backup".

If you have Messages or iCloud Photos Disabled, these are stored inside the iCloud Backup.

*If you follow what I did, your phone will be updated to the latest version

I would only restore as a last resort in the event that Apple engineers cannot fix the issue.*

Also for context I restored to iOS 13.3 and had success, not 13.3.1(the latest as of now) so while it’s always a good idea to stay on the latest firmware and worth a shot I doubt that is the actual problem since it resolved itself on 13.3

Well, for starters i only have 20GB in iCloud storage, nowhere near 169GB. So the process could take considerably longer for your messages content. Potentially 2 weeks since 20GB took just under 2 days.

Also regarding the 169-30GB difference mine also shows a large difference 20GB icloud-7.5GB phone storage. I think that the attachments in messages are now classified under photos or not at all on the phone. because mine is showing 7.5GB but everything is indeed there.

If you haven’t tried waiting two weeks after toggling messages or restoring your phone. Perhaps just try waiting that amount of time and see if it fixes itself.

****You should note that if you restore, all of your settings will be lost, all of your apps will need to be re-downloaded / setup. (Some apps may not require this if they have separate toggles in iCloud settings) Essentially your phone will be brand new and blank except for the toggles you see in iCloud options.****

Also if the information is that important I would do a backup using iTunes and iCloud before trying anything. This way you can revert to your current setup if you find that you need something that was not synced to iCloud.

With that out of the way a DFU (Device Firmware Update) restore (to my knowledge) bypasses the phones software for putting it into recovery mode and is useful if your phone is not working at all. It’s mainly just a habit but not usually necessary to use. There are plenty of tutorials on how to enter your phone into DFU mode online if you’d like to use it for recovery.

The important parts of what I did to get my messages info section back were:

-Backup with iTunes and iCloud in case something goes wrong.

-Put phone into recovery mode

-Press ”restore” once the iTunes detects the phone.

-Wait for it to finish the restore then handle the rest of the setup on the phone itself.

-When asked if you want to recover your data from a backup, another phone, etc.. choose setup as new phone

-Complete the setup as normal

-Once on the home screen, look at your iCloud settings and enable everything you typically use (Except messages)

-Wait for everything to sync back (notes ,photos ,mail, etc..)

-after your phone is *completely finished* downloading everything enable messages and wait.

Again for you that may take longer than 2 weeks because of the amount of data you have. I would definitely bank on apples engineers before trying the steps that solved my problem

This is just what I did. Every situation is different and this may not work for you. However with the iTunes and iCloud backups you should be safe since you can restore to them if needed.

Hello all!!

A FIX!

I upgraded from an X to an 11 and had this same FRUSTRATING issue and I was totally ****** as I had YEARS of threads with messages and there was no way I wanted to scroll through those to find pics!!

It is now fixed and I shall tell y’all what I did.

Two things, and I honestly don’t know which one fixed it but I am pretty sure it was the first one. Support suggested these things to me and I am so grateful but they didn’t even know if either would actually would work.

1. Settings / Siri & Search / Messages - I toggled everything OFF within the Messages. Then powered down the phone and powered it back on after a few minutes. I then went BACK to Siri & Search and toggled everything back ON. After a minutes a FEW photos started appearing and in SOME messages it would now at least show the photo area and it stated something like “More photos will show once they finish indexing” <Make sure you are connected to WiFi>

2 I updated the software to 13.4.1 (however the indexing of photos had already began before I did this)

It took about 12 hours but all my photos are now BACK in the “info” section on the messages.

Hope this helps.

Hello guys, I am facing the same issue with iMessage on iOS for a long time and was looking for a solution in order to fix it and get my photos back. If i visit a chat and click on »i« and scroll down, then I iMessage offers me to download the photos from iCloud (like the recommended post (user "AHall4" on Sep 20. 2019) in this topic already shows). It is loading a few min and seems to not respond. But then … it will do nothing. No photos are loaded, or at least none of them are shown.

My Solution! (Especially for those of you guys who have a high emotional attachment to the photos.)

In case you own a Mac (needs to be synchronized with iCloud): go to iMessage, "Details" and there are all your photos. It worked for me. And I was able to export the important photos or move them directly to my synchronized "photos".

Sorry, if this was already suggested. I don't wanna read all 27 Pages in this topic. However, maybe it will help someone ;)