Missing photos in iMessage after iOS 26 update

That is due to me having sent docs / photos / links since I got the phone. However those are the only ones that showed up. In order to get the full history back I restored the new phone from the icloud backup.

After that - still no photos tab with all photos dating back to 2015. I then went to settings > tapped my name at the very top > icloud > messages > sync now. This can take a while depending on how many messages you have saved in icloud and how long you have it set to save them for and the sync process for me took a few days to complete and required me to check multiple times a day because it will pause randomly for some reason. Once the sync was completed. I started to see the option to download the historical attachments under the info tab in each conversation.

For some reason my reply has been deleted -- but quickly -- I managed to solve this issue by doing the following:

• Subscribed to iCloud (had not done that previously, even though transferring phone to phone always used to work fine!)
• Backed up my OLD phone completely (took about 2 days!) - photos, messages, everything.
• Restored my information from the cloud to the NEW phone from a clean install (wiped clean from previous attempts, at the "Hello" screen, choose from iCloud restore)
• At first, it did not appear to work -- but in about 12-24 hours, the "Photos" tab began to appear under the text message threads. I then had to open each one, click on it, and scroll all the way to the end, and this "forced" it to populate all the blank image slots and load them.

At times, this process would bog down, and it would just have an image of a placeholder gif, so I would have to shut down the NEW phone, restart it, open the iMessages app, go back to that thread, go back to the photos tab, scroll again to wherever it left off, and it would start populating the images again.

It took me a few hours, but it did finally work, and has worked since then for a few weeks now without incident.

This was a terrible issue, and I don't intend to keep using iCloud like this -- it was just for this one off and then I'll cancel and do the backup to my computer as I had done before and hopefully for the next update, this does not happen!

Go to Settings > Your Profile > iCloud > Messages, and turn off “Use on this iPhone” for Messages.

Then go to iPhone Storage > Messages, and delete all Documents and Data.

After that, re-enable Messages in iCloud — your phone will re-download all messages, and the Photos tab with all your pictures will reappear.

The reason the photos tab and documents tab shows up for me is because I have sent docs / photos/ links with this person since I have gotten the phone. Those were the only ones showing up under each tab though.

Additionally - after I restored my new phone from my icloud backup - I also went into my settings > icloud > messages and synched all of them - this process took a couple of days because the phone will pause the synch once you disconnect from wifi automatically and then you will have to go in and resume the synch again manually but then it will pause again if you re-connect to wifi and needs to be manually restarted. I also had 1.2m messages to synch so if you have less - it will likely be a lot quicker. Once that process completed each conversation under the info tab gave me the option to download all of the historical attachments. It is a slow process and will sporadically stop and need to be restarted but it worked for me. I have a lot more conversations to go and will likely take me a long time but everything else i've tried has not worked. only this.

I updated from 16pro running ios 26 (had the same issue when I updated to ios 26 on this device too)

upgraded to air running ios 26 and was able to find this fix

I had this same issue! I bought an iphone 17 with ios26 and the photos tab and everything was gone - it's been a week and I updated this morning to 26.0.1, it was still annoying me but I just restarted my phone and it's all synced up again and the photos, links, documents etc are back in imessage! yay! fingers crossed it works for everyone else!

If you go to settings , iPhone storage, messages,top conversations, find the same message thread and click on it. I see the photos tab exists thru that view but not thru the messages app. 🤯

for the record I do not use messages in iCloud, everything is on the phone.

Turning the messages search toggles from off to on, and then also going into the previous text threads and randomly scrolling back up on the threads I think resolved the issue for me. Also recently we upgraded our phones to 17 pro so maybe that triggered the indexing to kick in again. There have been sometimes where the photo tab is missing from one text thread vs another, again going into the not working thread scrolling back up and then flipping thru the tabs (info, links, documents) a bunch of times brought the tab back. Ensure you're plugged into to power and on wifi because that is when the indexing happens. My scenario is not depended on icloud, i don't use that.

matty190 wrote:

I do not have a photos tab at all… I turned on the sync on my iCloud for messages but no photos tab. Any tips and tricks?

I would open Settings and go to Search > Messages, then turn off both toggles, wait a few seconds, and toggle them back on. Then, give it some time- it'll probably take several days, maybe even a week (depending on the amount of attached pictures you have) to index everything and become visible again.

Hey, I completely understand your frustration. Reading your post felt like reading my own notes — our cases are almost identical at a technical level.

I’ve been troubleshooting this for years across multiple devices and OS cycles. I’ve replicated the issue on every iPhone I’ve owned (I upgrade every launch day), and like you, I’ve gone through every documented and undocumented reset/workaround imaginable. At one point I even bought a second iPhone just so I could run side-by-side tests with fresh installs, different restore paths, and isolated variables.

Here’s the short technical summary:

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• Device → device transfers: No change
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• Fresh iCloud restores: No change
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• Fresh setup with Messages redownload: No change
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• iCloud Messages off/on cycles with multi-day indexing windows: No change
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• Full erase + set up as NEW (no restore): No change
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• Turning off optimize storage: No change
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• Debug logs + sysdiagnose + screen recordings multiple times: Done
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• Different networks (fiber, private, enterprise, 5G): No impact
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• Multiple Apple IDs / test profiles: Same behavior
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• Different storage levels, power states, and network conditions: No effect
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Exact same failure mode every time:

Messages appears to sync, but the local photo/video grid for contacts never fully rebuilds, even though the iCloud corpus contains all media. iPad and Mac pull down the complete library instantly. iPhone never does. It stalls at some arbitrary subset (for me ~10GB visible vs 155GB actual).

This is despite the iPhone staying plugged in overnight, forced indexing periods, manual rebuild attempts, and the usual “leave it plugged in on Wi-Fi and wait” recommendations. In my case:

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• 858,000 messages total
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• 155GB of Messages data
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• iPad + Mac = perfect, complete media grids
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• iPhone = partial, inconsistent, never completes
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• No correlation with remaining device storage, network throughput, or power state
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The worst part is the support cycle. Every time a new senior advisor gets involved, it starts strong for the first week, and they genuinely try. By week three the communication drops off. Engineering repeatedly returns the same response: “Known issue. Sufficient logs captured. Monitor future OS releases.”

And like you, I check Software Update daily because every advisor promises, “It should be addressed in a future release.”

After years of this, and hundreds of hours spent collecting diagnostics for Apple, I can confidently say this is not a user-side configuration issue, nor is it related to corrupted backups or network environments. This is a reproducible sync/indexing bug that only affects iPhone — likely in the photo-grid metadata rebuild process or the Messages daemon responsible for reattaching media locally.

Until Apple addresses it in the OS layer, there’s nothing left for us to try.

I wish I had better news. Your story is my story — down to the hours invested. Hopefully Apple prioritizes this, because for power users with large message histories, this is a core functionality issue.

I also have this issue. I did not transfer to a new phone, I simply updated my iPhone 11 to iOS 26. There was no photo tab at all after the update, so as per advice on here I enabled iCloud sync of messages and photos. I only have the free 5gb, so I deleted most of my photos first so it would work.

After all this, the photos finally showed up. But I don’t want I cloud syncing of my photos or texts, so then turned off sync. I still see all the photos from before this, but all photos I’ve sent or received since then dont show up in the photos tab.

This is super annoying! Temporarily turning on iCloud sync will only bring it up to date, it is not a permanent fix. This seems to imply you must have an active iCloud subscription to get a basic function of the messaging app.

Had the same issue. I looked into this thread last week (week of Nov. 17), after receiving my iPhone 17 PM and setting it up on Nov. 6. I saw that most of the comments talked about backing up my old phone to iCloud, but I didn't want to pay for that since I already pay for Google One. For backups and keeping ips files from my old phone, that probably would've been best, but I'll survive.

Well, needless to say, today all my photos from all conversations are there. I do not delete messages, except with people I'm inactive with, and have conversations backed up through several generations of iPhones. My earliest dated text and photo is like 2016.

It took a little over two full weeks for the iOS to backdate all my photos. Hope yours has returned or will soon!

Exactly the same, it started with my iPhone 14 Pro, when downgrading from 1TB of storage to 512GB because of price hikes that year. Ever since it's been a mess with no solutions. I spent the same amount of time with Apple Support, maybe more, so many of them "senior" advisors being clueless or rude because they had no solution but tried to pretend it wasn't an actual issue. So many of them promised to follow up but never did. 

I have 205GB of iMessage data in iCloud, and never able to get it on my iPhone no matter what I try. 

When going into iPhone storage, the information I see is false. It says iMessage is only a few GB, but if I turn off iMessage in iCloud, all of a sudden I have 100GB of messages data. The storage appears different if I connect to my Mac in Finder vs what I see on my iPhone settings. 

On my Mac I'm able to see all photos/videos in the Messages app, although it only downloads around 150GB of data, not the full 205GB. 

On iPhone the behaviour changes each time, but overall the "download" button is useless, it says it downloads but it doesn't, or maybe it does in the background but nothing appears in photos. The number it gives is also false, usually 30% or less of the actual amount of photos I've exchanged with said people. If I scroll indefinitely I may be able to find some photos, although some never want to download. 

It's so frustrating to have been paying for many years for that iCloud+ 2TB storage and I can't get a decent service. Also frustrating that WhatsApp ALWAYS backs up and restores content perfectly, each year I upgrade, while Messages remains a mess. 

I don't know what to do anymore. 

Yes, some users have reported similar issues after upgrading to iOS 26, especially related to missing media and chat history. Apple often releases minor updates to fix such bugs, so keeping your device updated is recommended.

I started a new question last night but have since been trolling this one. It's so absolutely frustrating and irritating! I feel as if I'm being held hostage! I've got a brand new iPhone 17 Pro but I'm afraid to make it any worse by transitioning from my iPhone 14 Pro Max. The only other thing I've done since I made my post is a hard reset which did nothing. This is what I posted but it's basically the same old refrain:

How do I fix missing photos in iMessage conversations after upgrading to iOS 18.7.1?

Please help. I'm not as technologically advanced as I used to be. I updated my 14 Pro Max from iOS 17.7 to iOS 18.7.1 on Nov. 4th. Ever since then all the photos/images in iMessage that were in the conversation threads prior to Nov 4th are not being displayed. All there is is a HEIC/JPEG or PNG image file. It doesn't matter who the message comes from. It doesn't matter if they're HEIC/JPEG or PNG. If I click on the download icon next to it nothing happens. If I click on the file image they'll appear but as soon as I scroll to another message they revert back to the black image square with the white square it. The texts where I have sent a picture to someone prior to November. 4th is just a black space. However if I click the space the picture displays and I can see it until I move to the text part of the message then it goes black again. If I go to a contact, choose photos and select all it appears as if some of them are there in the photos tab. I've searched forums and Apple Support articles and it appears as if there's a known issue that's ongoing in iOS 17, 18 and 26. So far I've done what was suggested to try:

settings>apps>messages>search>show apps in search and also show content in search and toggled them them both off, waited a minute or so then toggled them both on. It appeared as if the messages were indexing but now that process has finished and I still have no images in the body of the message conversations. I've got messages saved forever. I purchased a new 17 Pro the other day but I'm afraid to try to transition to it because of the issue with the iMessage photos. I'm also assuming that I'm going to have to update my 14 Pro Max from iOS 18.7.1 to iOS 26.1 before I try to transfer to the new phone, which I'm dreading. I haven't tried to switch iMessages off in iCloud, power off the phone then power it back on and turn iMessage back on in iCloud because I have over 25K of messages. At this point I'm afraid to do anything because I don't want lose them. If y'all have had the problem and resolved it what did you do?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Photos in iMessage texts only have a file icon on all those that were posted before upgrade to iOS 18.7.1 A redundant question but I need a resolution.

Same! After updating to iOS 26.0.1 and a reboot- the photos tab is now in all my message threads.

hope it’s the same for everyone