Recover photos from dead iPhone

If they haven't been backed up, there's nothing anyone here can do to help you. You could take your phone to a data recovery type company and see how much they might charge you to "try" to get the pictures off the phone.

pndinflkdshvibsodbvosvpob wrote:

Thanks. I'm considering it, but it looks like I'm kind of out of luck

It depends on how bad. If the logic board is somehow intact, it might be possible to get it working enough to extract a backup. Even if it’s just the CPU and flash left, it might be possible to transfer those to a donor board. But that kind of work is expensive and might take time. Once done your insurance company might not accept it.

On an iPhone 8 with Secure Enclave, that will not yield anything. If the SSD storage chips were still intact, and transferred to a donor board, there is no way to decrypt the data at that point. The only way to decrypt the data is with the SSD chips still tied to the original hardware and with some means of entering the screen lock passcode on a bootable IOS system - without that, you can stick those chips on anything you like, but you’re not getting data back. That is the whole point of Secure Enclave and the firmware/passcode encryption system - Apple designed this to defeat the whole piecemeal recovery of data from memory chips alone.

Nobody has ever shown any evidence that they can recover any Secure Enclave encrypted data from anything but the intact, original device hardware, in an iOS bootable state. It is not a matter of just an intact CPU and storage even. The Secure Enclave is a separate chip, and it and its use is in turn tied to a number of hardware IDs on the original device (and Apple does not publish nor say what all hardware IDs are tracked or required for the Secure Enclave chip to work properly, but it does depend on numerous hardware IDs matching).

You may well be out of luck. This is why backing up is very important especially when something catastrophic happens to your phone.

yea the guys right unless you backed them up you can't get them back