how can i get pictures off a broken iphone

Same phone 6s, same issue with phone being disabled after too many incorrect passcode attempts. The kicker here is the wrong passcode attempts were entered by the phone after the screen was broken. The screen was unresponsive/disabled so we could not power it down by swiping OFF on the screen. We had no idea about the 10 attempt limit before wiping your data off the phone, and no idea how to power it down by pressing the home key while holding the power button on the side of the phone for a few seconds. Who makes software that erases your data when the hardware breaks. No backups to restore :-(

Apple has designed iOS and iPadOS so that if a device is disabled, the one and the only way to reset it is to erase it by restoring it with iTunes or finder. The point of that feature is to guarantee that nobody at all can gain access to an Apple mobile device without knowing the passcode and see the data that is on it. iOS and iPadOS have always been designed this way.

So nobody can try guessing your passcode indefinitely (hence the 10 attempts). And once they hit that 10 attempts and disable the device, they cannot just reset it with intact data and no passcode and see all your personal data.

It is assumed any legitimate owner would just restore their own data to their own device from their own backup. But as always, backups need to be made and kept up to date before something disastrous happens.

And without a backup how were you going to recover data if you just lost the device? Or it was stolen.

You can’t.

Any backup needs to be made when the phone is working.

After it breaks, it’s to late.

No one, but when a screen breaks it can damage the digitizer which then can cause the phone to become disabled to protect your data.