important photos gone forever? / iOS 17.4 bug

finally got the issue sorted.

apple support reached out and collected all the diagnostic logs from my phone. after two weeks support team came back, installed a profile on my phone to do a restore of my photos library and ran restore. This removed all the photos from library which were backup to iCloud and restored all the deleted photos

this also fixed the issue of phone being slow and buggy.

unfortunately they could not find the root cause

if you are still facing the issue. Raise a Apple support ticket and ask them to do a photos library restore

Hi, I’d like to share an important discovery. I found the lost photos when plugging into Mac and then browsing the DCIM folder (I used iFunBox and it was in one of the DCIM subfolders). All the lost photos were there, but for some reason, not linked to iCloud Photo Library.

FYI, I also have had Apple support install a profile on my phone and collect diagnostic data. I could feel this happening again, I had 90 photos which were stuck uploading to iCloud, I managed to airdrop most of the files to my ipad, but some of the files were blurry and wouldn’t airdrop (stuck showing processing). In the files app, I couldn’t see any locations and when I locked my phone, it wouldn’t wake when tapping the screen like it usually does. This and other sluggish behaviour. When I restart, it showed ‘restoring from iCloud’.

As for triggers, it might have something to do with externally mounted accessories, in my case my DJI drone’s remote, or light night to SDCard. Not exactly sure what the trigger is, since I noticed it a few times after the fact.

I feel it is definitely a bug in 17.4.1/ 17.4 and didn’t happen previously.

Image showing file locations missing

I have the same bug in iOS 17.4 and 17.4.1 on my 11 pro Max. Then I wanted to do a „clean“ reinstall of iOS with iTunes and restore it with a backup. When I connected it to iTunes it says there is an update (iOS 17.4.1) but my phone already runs on it. Nevertheless I clicked an update. It downloads more than 7 gig (the whole iOS) image, then performing the update over the update assuming that it repairs the broken iOS?! Now iTunes says like before that my phone has iOS 17.4.1 installed but it says also „up to date“. All of the lost photos went back when I connected the phone to iTunes. Also did a new iCloud backup (took hours) and it was nearly 400gig big. Then it shrinked to 240. Everything seems to run better now. But not as good as before 17.4. the issue didn’t appear yet. Let’s wait til 17.4.2 😅 hope that helps a bit. I have no clue what’s going on inside. Maybe the last updates (all installed OTA) hung….

An update on my previous comment in this thread, I tried calling support to see if they could do a photo library reset on their end with no success.

I upgraded to iOS 17.5 this morning and all the pictures and videos I took are back now. I'm happy to have them back but I have no idea what happened for the photos/videos to not exist anywhere and suddenly they're back like nothing happened

I had the exact same issue, I could recover the photo with "ifunbox". I had to use an Intel Mac to make the last version working, then I navigate to the different folder in DCIM, and I could find the photo.

Most of the missing photo on my photo library were happened with X or a D on the file name (ex: IMG_1234X.HEIC)

Go to Settings/General/iPhone Storage and see how much free storage you have. If it is less than 10% of total storage or 1 GB (whichever is less) there was no storage available to store your photos.

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

• iCloud photo sync
• Manual iCloud backup
• Automatic nightly iCloud backup
• iTunes backup
• Transfer your photos and videos to your computer via USB cable
• emailed, texted or messaged the items to friends or family
• 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.

iOS 17.5 fixed the problem for me!

i just helped my friend retrieve her photos that were deleted when she updated her iPhone. Go into photos app, that’s the one that looks like a rainbow flower, and find the “recently deleted” album. You need to scroll all the way down to bottom to find it I believe. Tap on that album and you should see all of the photos that were recently deleted. My friend’s photos that were deleted with update were there, thankfully! Hopefully yours will be too. Next, you can select all the photos you want to put back into your photo album. You can select many at one time by gliding your finger across rows to do this quicker. Be very careful during this process that you don’t permanently delete. FYI, and time you delete photos, tgey go to this temporary recently deleted holding folder and sit there for awhile, so you DO have the option of going back to keep them if you change your mind. Once you delete any photos in that recently deleted album though, they are GONE. I hope this helps you retrieve the photos of your ill mom. 💜

I have an iPhone and initially got one because of the accessibility features. These features are lacking on android, though they've gotten much better over the years. I am considering switching to android as well. The issue for me was at least sort of fixed by me turning off iCloud photos and turning it back on, I didn't get the videos back. However, I had two other issues. The first one was that I could not delete videos, I could but they would just appear, the second was that I took a photo and was unable to share it. Absolutely ridiculous.

I posted in this thread before, but this has happened to me three more times. The most frustrating part? You can view the photos/videos on your phone, but you can't share them. You can't use an app to sync them with an external source. If you hit the Share button, it will hang on "Preparing" forever. If you use an app like PhotoSync, it will hang at "Transfer Progress 0.0%".

It's mind-boggling that Apple hasn't even acknowledged this. I recorded my daughter's preschool class singing a song this morning, and while I can still watch the video on my phone, I can't send the video from my phone to anyone (Share button), and I can't sync it to my SMB server or to any other cloud service. And when I restart my phone, the video will be lost. So I need to have my wife hold her iPhone in front of my iPhone screen and record while I play the video so we don't lose it.

As massively inconvenient as it would be to switch from the iPhone ecosystem to an Android, my opinion has gone from, "Not worth the hassle" to "I don't see any other option if I want to retain the ability to actually keep my precious photos and videos."

Apple's reputational damage may be limited to whatever small portion of the user base is experiencing this issue, but to those who are experiencing it, Apple is looking worse and worse every day by not acknowledging this or communicating about a pending fix.

This is ABSOLUTELY crazy. Same thing happened to me. Phone getting unresponsive, couldn’t send photos via WhatsApp, Facebook, shared album or airdrop.

Decided to restart my phone and 100 photos I cared much about in the last two hours were gone and the photos app is stuck at “restoring iCloud Photos…”.

It seems to be a software bug judging how many people on the internet is having the same type of problem. I’ve been with Apple for 10 years now and iOS 17 is being the most unstable OS I’ve ever seen.

Sad that you can’t even rely on your 1200€ phone to store pictures properly. Hopefully they’re still there and it’s just an indexing issue.

iPhone 14 Pro 256Gb here, and 70gb free on the device.

Have you updated to 17.5.1, as mentioned in the post right above yours?

If the phone has shut down to cool down it most likely has experienced a hardware failure. In a normal environment an iPhone will never get hot enough to shut down unless some major component in the phone has failed.

Log in to https://icloud.com/photos to see if the photos were saved.

Not from overheating. I was hiking in the mountains, in the snow. Took beautiful pictures including Mountain Sheep. Then suddenly it would not let me post to Facebook. It wouldn't let me open photos in Pixelmator, so I rebooted my phone. When it was done rebooting all my photos from today were gone. It really seems like a filesystem issue to me and I am confident that it has nothing to do with overheating.

It just happened to me. I had taken about 17 photos and a couple of videos and put them into an album with a name called “Spring Valley“. I noticed my phone became very unresponsive about 30 minutes later and I ended up having to restart the device. After the reboot, I went back in to photos and all 17 of the photos and videos are missing and there is no album by that name. If I go to the function inside of photos and search for Spring Valley, I find the album and it says it has the photos and videos. But if I click on the album from the search, it shows the spring valley folder/album but there are no photos and videos inside of it. I hit the three dots in the top right to try to choose additional actions, nothing happens, there are no options for me to choose.

If I go back into photos and look for the Spring Valley album, it does not exist. The photos I’ve taken are there something strange going on with what looks to be the underlying file structure or index behind the photos application. I truly believe that the photos are probably still on the device, in the memory, but there is some form of corruption in the photo applications data at this point.

I have never seen this happen before other previous iOS, device or version of iOS. This only started after I upgraded to 17.4.

I will also note that the device has had a lot of lag after upgrading to 17.4, such as, a huge delay of screen responsiveness coming from idle. if the screen is off and I tap the screen to get it to come on there is often a 5 to 10 second delay before the screen comes on. Again that last part is unrelated, but the device is definitely not performing the way it was when I purchased it less than a month ago.