Photos in iMessage disappeared after ios13 update

Everyone viewing this page that has this issue, you MUST contact Apple support and continue to press the issue. They at some point should ask you to send in diagnostics information. If enough people contact them maybe something can be done about this. Don’t just read from this discussions page.

When you say you got a new phone and did a fresh restore.

explain that.

do you mean you restored the 13.2.2 software or you just restored your backup on the new phone?

its imperative that you do a system restore to 13.2.2 before restoring your backup.

the system restore will format the device and install 13.2.2 which is different than the over the air update which only patches files.

even then, after you restore your backup to the device it will take 24 hours for the images to start to show up.

At this point guys I don’t think Apple support is going to offer any further support unless you restore your phone with the latest software.

something was not working right in one of the past updates and you need to wipe the OS and then restore your backup.

if you have messages in the cloud enabled you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. The messages are kept separate from the iCloud backup.

The data is in the cloud, unless you have specifically deleted any data from your phone it will be in the cloud.

new phone, old phone, doesn’t matter. A format of the system partition is required.

properly restore your device and this will solve your issue.

cant keep repeating it over and over... the incorrect storage display is only the messages however the messages are indeed there.

I can promise you that you are not going to get a resolution or patch unless you restore your device and no one at Apple will guarantee your data is going to be safe or compensate you for the inconvenience of this.

it is what it is.

I said it before and I’ll say it again:

the cloud is not a “backup”. You always need a offsite/offline backup of the backup. This is standard and many people don’t follow it until they run into a disaster situation and it’s just to late.

itunes back up on a external HDD if you have to. If you ever accidentally delete a message at least you can revert to something if you have to.

Yes, that is correct.

at this point I’m not even sure if it’s an indexing issue anymore?

it seems like the phone isn’t downloading all data from iCloud hence ALL your data being indexed.

seems like indexing is working for what is downloaded but the phone isn’t downloading all data. I was reading Catalina for Mac has iCloud issues as well.

anyone having these issues can you confirm if your iCloud storage (settings - iCloud - iCloud storage) matches your phone storage (settings - general- phone storage) under the messages section?

when ever I disable “messages” in the iCloud settings I see a message saying “all messages have not downloaded”.

If you are having this issue I suggest we all open a ticket. Also, I know it may be a long shot but email Tim. Someone needs to be reading his email somewhere. We need to bring this to someones attention. Clearly this is affecting many people 300+ and that’s only the ones that come to this forum. If you don’t know his email google it. It’s not that hard to find. Apple publicizes it in their Apple watch promos.

we are all paying top dollar for iCloud service and the amount of developers Apple has bugs like this are unacceptable and when they affect our data and pay services they need to be rectified fast.

I restarted my device and turned off messages from my icloud and turned it back on after 30 secs, I opened the messages app and saw the “more photos will be shown after indexing”, then I plugged my device in and connected it to wifi, after around 8 hours they were there the next morning. But they’re gone again :(

I actually got through to Apple on Thursday and they submitted a ticket to engineering. They called me back today with an update and told me this is a known issue, they have had a lot of complaints, and they are working on a fix. So, it sounds like our efforts may be working!! They did not have a timeline, but said it’s being worked on and may come through as a software update or they may just be able to fix it without a software update (not sure how they do it, but he said if that’s the case they'd all just reappear on my phone).

I agree - mine are all still within the message thread, just not under "info". 13.6 has not solved the problem for me. When I toggle Messages to "off" under iCloud in settings I get this message: "Messages have not been fully downloaded to this iPhone" and I can select "Disable and Download Messages". My phone then pretends to download the attachments/images but no matter how long I wait (plugged in, connected to wifi) nothing changes. Then when I toggle it back on, nothing changes again. There is clearly a connection issue here between our iCloud accounts and our phones. I really just wish they would fix it especially since many of us have spent hours of our time and reported this all the way up to the engineers at Apple.

I also have the same problem and did call apple support. Got a senior tech advisors who have escalated the issue to engineering. They will call me back Nov 2. The same thing happened to my wife's phone also. I would agree that more people need to call apple about this.

I called yesterday and explained what happened on sept of 19 and I have called every few months to see if there was any updates. Senior advisor basically stated that the file gets corrupted and that they become Unretrievable... what are they telling everyone else. Also had to provide the url to this thread for them to see

I guess I’m going to try logging out and back into iCloud.

Just called for the 4th time and they want me to put my phone in recovery mode and plug into iTunes and restart me whole phone

What iOS version are you on? When you scroll to the bottom of pictures is there anything remaining to download?

Close all apps, Reboot the phone, check again

Don’t worry about it. mine does this sometimes. Try quitting all apps and reboot, same with iPhone, it will resolve on its own.