I can’t open the Photos app

There are many ways of preserving photos and videos. Did you do any of these?

• emailed, texted or messaged the photos to friends or family
• iCloud photo sync
• Manual iCloud backup
• Automatic nightly iCloud backup
• iTunes backup
• Transfer your photos to your computer via USB cable
• Sync to Google Photos
• Sync to some other photo archiving service such as Shutterfly
• Sync to Dropbox
• Sync to box.com
• Sync to Microsoft OneDrive
• Sync to Amazon Photos
• back up to Livedrive
• Backup to any other backup or archiving service
• Transfer them to a Flash drive through the lightning port on your iPhone, using a product such as SanDisk 64 GB iXpand Flash Drive Go - Apple

A final option is if you synced your photos to iCloud, you have a Mac, and you use Time Machine to back up your Mac automatically, you can open Time Machine and restore the photo library to an earlier date. To do this on your Mac open Finder, then click on Pictures in the sidebar and launch Time Machine. Go to a time before the photos were deleted and restore

Photos Library.photoslibrary. (If you had ever changed the name of the photo library restore that file instead).

If the answer is no to all of the above your photos are gone forever.

“Hardware” is the circuit board, the microcircuits on the circuit board, the resistors, capacitors, inductors, connections, wires, antennas, battery, screen, camera, etc. There are over 1,000 parts inside an iPhone, and one or more of them may have failed. The phone can only be repaired by a qualified technician if there is a hardware failure.

Have you tried force restarting the phone?

• Press and quickly release VOLUME UP

     then

• Press and quickly release VOLUME DOWN

     then

• Hold the SIDE button until an Apple logo appears (15-30 seconds), ignoring "slide to power off" if it appears

The operative word here is QUICKLY; and try it a couple of times, the timing is a little tricky.

What happens when you try to open the photos app? Did you have your photos in the photo stream option? If so, that was shut down by Apple this week. See if this helps: If an app on your iPhone or iPad stops responding, closes unexpectedly, or won’t open - Apple Support

It sounds like you need to get an appointment at an Apple Store for help with this. If you open the photos app and get a black screen and then the app shuts down after 20 seconds, there may be a hardware problem.

Deleting the app does not delete photos.

What you should do is go to Settings/[your name]/iCloud and turn on iCloud Photos, then wait for your photos to sync to iCloud to preserve them. Plug in the phone and stay connected to Wi-Fi until it finishes. You can view them at https://icloud.com/photos.

I don’t understand that at all. If you have photos and videos on your phone they will sync to iCloud when you turn on the Photos switch. If they don’t then you don’t actually have any photos and videos on your phone.

The hardware is the phone itself and some connection inside may have failed.