Retrieving photos from a broken phone

If the phone is broken, you will not be able to retrieve any photos that are stored only on the phone. Hopefully you were using iCloud Photos long before you dropped the phone in the toilet – giving the phone plenty of opportunity to have synced your older photos and videos to iCloud.

You can log into the iCloud Web interface (https://www.icloud.com/) to see what has made it to the cloud.

All you can do is wait and see if it dries out enough to backup to icloud.

In the future:

1) perform automatic nightly backups

2) don't use your phone while using the toilet

Zorksortronz wrote:

In the future:

1) perform automatic nightly backups

Enabling automatic backups is a good idea – but for photos, I prefer to enable iCloud Photos. When you do that, the iPhone no longer includes photos in backups. Instead, iCloud Photos itself acts as a sort of backup.

This has some advantages:

• If your photos are in an iCloud backup, you have to restore the backup to a phone (wiping the phone's current contents) to see what is in the backup. If they are in iCloud Photos, you can access them via a Web browser – even before you have replaced a broken, lost, or stolen phone.
• If your photos are in iCloud Photos, you can synchronize them to other devices (like a Mac).

Thanks for the clarification. That is actually what I do and my photos are shared across my 3 devices.