iPhone 7 on the white screen of death

Hi everyone,

I'll give you the full picture here:

Everything was perfectly fine with my phone until last night - in the morning, my iPhone storage was full and kept giving me that notification. I tried to delete photos but it wouldn't work properly. When I went back into the app, the photos were back again so maybe that was the start of my iPhone going haywire.

Later that evening, my iPhone shut off and so I charged it, only to be stuck on a loop of the white Apple logo.

I followed the advice from this community to plug it into my MacBook and it took 10+ tries of a hard reset on my iPhone to finally be miraculously recognised on my MacBook 'finder'. I then updated to iOS14 and waited for about an hour (left my desk). When I came back, everything had already disappeared from my MacBook (no signs of the update and no recognition of my iPhone on Finder). However, instead of the white Apple logo being stuck on a involuntary loop (turning off then on again with the same white logo screen), it is just stuck on a still white Apple logo now. No amount of hard reset will get it to budge! It is not getting recognised by my MacBook either!

I have 5000 photos on this iPhone which I had tried to import on my MacBook the day before and it was lagging a lot so I thought I'd postpone it to today instead and just my luck... Is there any other home solutions that I can attempt to get my iPhone to work somehow?

Should I continue to do a hard reset in attempts of it being recognised again by my MacBook? I've already tried different USB cables to see if that was the problem. I really need these precious photos back.

My last solution is to go to an Apple store (I would prefer to go in person) but I'm based in Melbourne where we are in tough lockdown.

Any suggestions?

Sorry for the long post.