important photos gone forever? / iOS 17.4 bug

Same thing happened to me today, 03-30-24 on 17.4.1 on an iPhone 13 Pro model MLTY3LL/A with Visible eSIM.

Went to zoo and took many photos and videos. Many of them are gone now. Some really good ones of the kids that I would like to recover!

The whole day, my phone was kinda flaky where I couldn’t get the phone to wake up for about five seconds after pulling it out of my pocket.

Later in the day, I turned my iPhone off and back on again. The photos have disappeared!

I had even posted them to an iCloud Shared Album with friends and family, and they’re gone from there too. They’re not in Recently Deleted. I had posted four pictures to the album and after the restart, only two can be found. Many I didn’t post to the album are missing.

Got very similar issue, described in this post: Missing pictures and videos in Photos fro… - Apple Community

(photos are also gone and nowhere to be found).

Also have the 'Files'-app freezing and making phone completely unresponsive and have to do a force restart to be able to use it again.

currently on iOS 17.4.1, iPhone 12

Went to a waterfall in Cornwall, with the wife and our cocker spaniel. Was a bit pricey to get in, so we thought we’d make the most of it. Took lots of photos, had some other people take photos of us, sun was shining, took slow motion videos and 4k videos.

At some point restarted phone because it became slow and unresponsive. Couldn’t even swipe to shut down, I had to ask Siri to restart for me. Even the UI on the shutdown screen was malformed, I have a screenshot ironically but all other photos of that day have disappeared.

No chance of it uploading to iCloud, since this would normally happen at the end of the day. You don’t expect to loose photos you have taken over the last 8 hours to just disappear. Totally unacceptable and would consider moving to android.

Screenshot of malformed shutdown screen:

Apple engineers said they could see other reports, asked if I had ever connected to an SMB share, incidentally I do have one mounted, but didn’t use it that day, but wondered if anyone else had SMB share mounted.

Also referenced if I mounted any external storage.

Adding to this thread.

Took some important photos of a friends going away party on Friday. Had a friends hangout on Saturday taking a couple photos/videos then. Started having the same issue where my phone started acting unresponsive with the Safari and the Files App on Sunday Morning. Forced it to restart because the screen would not turn on.

Both days photos/videos are gone now.

I do overnight cloud backups with 2TB of storage with over 1TB left over. My 14 Pro is on 17.4.1 and has over 100GB of space left and it’s not like I took that many photos for it to be more than 100GB. It’s frustrating that my backups were not done since the 17th with no warning or heads up that it failed. The backups can be done via WiFi or cellular and it still wasn’t done overnight since then.

This is a bad bug and Im going to consider other 3rd party services instead of Apples for photos

There was a problem with the original 17.4.1. So Apple released an update version, but it had to be installed using iTunes.

As your issue has absolutely nothing to do with the post from Phong Huynh over a week ago about a phone overheating I suggest you start a new thread by clicking on Ask the Community at the top of this page. Your problem sounds like the phone was colder than it’s low temperature limit, and as a result iOS crashed.

Ran into similar issue.

phone was slow and safari was not opening. Rebooted and noticed few of the photos that I have take today are missing.

Removed photos are not available in deleted folder as well.

Is there a way to get the photos back ?

Thanks for the suggestions.

my iPhone has 10GB free space.

I have enable iCloud and OneDrive sync for photos.

unfortunately, photos didn’t backup and photos got auto deleted before the sync could happen.

Went hiking with the family yesterday. During a break, all the photos and videos were still there. After we got back home, I did some surfing in Safari and the iPhone 14 Pro (14.7.1) suddenly became slow and could no longer be operated. After a restart, everything worked normally again, but about half an hour later it turned out that about 2/3 of the photos and videos from that day had disappeared. The photos from the beginning of the hike are still there, but from then on it's as if the trip had never taken place.

Same here. Took 10+ photos during a 4h hike. Came home and was unable to send any of that photos in iMessage or WhatsApp (phone stuck saying „preparing to send“). Tried to restart my Phone and all of that photos where gone (also not in „recently deleted“ or „hidden“).

iPhone 14 Pro, latest iOS 17.4.1 (21E236)

Update: I had been hit by this bug several times.

While still on 17.4.1, I did a factory reset of my iPhone and then restored my iCloud backup.

After doing this, the Reminders app is blank. I can’t create new reminders or see existing ones.

I disabled and reenabled iCloud reminders, rebooted, don’t fix it.

At this point, I’m probably going to use AppleCare to have Apple just replace my iPhone, sell it, and buy a Google Pixel 8.

[Edited by Moderator]

I left a comment in this thread about 17.5 but Apple removed it. Maybe thiwill stay if I’m careful with my words.

a factory reset of 17.4.1 and restore of iCloud backup introduces NEW problems. Upgrading to 17.5 does not resolve the new issues. Have only been on it a day so I haven’t seen a recurrence of the photos bug.

I’m getting an an-dr-oid. Tired of not being able to use my phone.

I restarted my iPhone 12 because find my iPhone was reloading and reloading for other devices. I did a proper restart, one button on each side. When the phone came back on, ALL pictures from the last two days were wiped out, they were not in the recently deleted folder, they were not on the iCloud. These were pictures of my son's prom day. One day of his life I won't be able to repeat. I pay for iCloud storage (2TB), but since there is no way to demonstrate Apple's responsibility, there is no liability or compensation. I knew I had been in an unfair relationship with Apple, but I did not know how little response there would be when their products don't work the way they are expected. The picture files which are time stamped, all of May 30th and May 31st, 2004 are gone. Not edited, it is not like I deleted some and kept some. They are all gone. But there is no way to prove that I did not delete all of them (because technically I could have gone temporarily insane), so too bad for me. Apple never looses. Smile and keep paying for automatic back up and storage. I am sure I missed some part in the small print in their terms of service where they told me this could happen and they were not liable. Now, on to buy the new iPhone, get further in debt, and cross my fingers that the quality is still there and that it does not go the way Boeing quality went.

Do you share an Apple ID with anyone who might have deleted the photos from iCloud, which would have deleted them from your phone also?