Why is the camera roll album gone iOS 8

Where are the Photo Stream album? I had a lot of photos there which weren't at Camera Roll... and now, all gone!!!!!!!!! And they aren't on my iCloud account!!!!! I want my pictures from Photo Stream back!!!!!!

Photo Stream is not a permanent storage facility for your photos. Although up to 1000 Photo Stream photos could have been on your device at any given time, the stored Photo Stream in iCloud only had the most recent 30 days of photos. So, when you updated, your device downloaded all of the available photos from Photo Stream, and those were the last 30 days worth.

With the new structure in the Photos app, this won't happen anymore because all photos in the Recently Added Album are moved into your Photos library on the device immediately. While they are in the Recently Added Album, they are shared between devices, and show up in Photo Stream on your Mac or PC. After 30 days they are deleted from Recently Added, but remain on your device.

Sorry, but if you didn't import those photos in the Photo Stream that were older than 30 days old, they are not anywhere anymore....

Sorry,

GB

I thankyou for your explanation but totallly misyfied at Aplle not warning us very clearly before upgrading. My phone is 32 gb, bought to store many photos as a library to show clients. Others will have images of personal memories that can not be replaced of possinly loved ones who have oassed.

I am astonished at this thoughtless decision with such little car of the devastaing consequeces lost of older images can have.

what the **** were they thinking?

Alan

alanfromwickford wrote:

I thankyou for your explanation but totallly misyfied at Aplle not warning us very clearly before upgrading. My phone is 32 gb, bought to store many photos as a library to show clients. Others will have images of personal memories that can not be replaced of possinly loved ones who have oassed.

I am astonished at this thoughtless decision with such little car of the devastaing consequeces lost of older images can have.

what the **** were they thinking?

Alan

I don't know how many times people have to be told over the years to BACKUP vital data. It is times like this when people are caught out but the blame rests with them to a very large degree for not protecting their data.

Pete

It wouldn't have killed Apple to remind people that OS upgrades are perilous and that it would be a good idea to back up irreplaceable content before upgrading. Pixels are cheap. It would have been a particularly helpful reminder given that Apple - having touted how the new Photos app was going to make our lives so much better, was in a far better position than its users to appreciate the implications of the upgrade for users who had not, in fact, been regularly backing up.

One of the persistent explanations for this pretty basic, and for many, unwelcome change in Camera Roll / Photostream behavior is that Apple is simply trying to conform the operation of the OS to the way its customers behave. ("Customers don't want to delete things in two places. Customers want to retrieve deleted photos.") Surely Apple is aware that, years of admonitions aside, many many of its customers fail to practice smart backup practices. It wouldn't have been hard for Apple in this regard too to conform its behavior to the known and expected behavior of its customers.

Or, if a warning - buried as it might be in a page of click-through verbiage - might not drive the point home, then code in something in the upgrade process that ensures that photos on the device which are not mirrored in the cloud, be preserved in a special folder. When an upgrade process is *going* to remove data from a phone, Apple was either sloppy in not realizing that; or callous in not specifically warning its customers of the risk. ("Warning! This upgrade will delete from your phone any photos you have not backed up! Do you want to proceed, Y/N?")

Actually there are plenty of excuses for not backing up your data properly. You don't have a computer. You don't want to pay for the extra iCloud storage. You are on vacation. There are of course lousy excuses too, like, you're lazy or you don't think about it much or bad things never happen to you. It doesn't matter. As a matter of pure fact, lots of people are bad about backups. Apple can't keep people from dropping their phones into toilets but they can do something about OS upgrades that remove data from phones without telling users, who don't back up, what is about to happen.

John Dorsey wrote:

Actually there are plenty of excuses for not backing up your data properly.

Yup, and all bad.

If it's important, back it up, or take the chance of losing it without warning. That is the reality.

John Dorsey wrote:

Actually there are plenty of excuses for not backing up your data properly. You don't have a computer. You don't want to pay for the extra iCloud storage. You are on vacation. There are of course lousy excuses too, like, you're lazy or you don't think about it much or bad things never happen to you. It doesn't matter. As a matter of pure fact, lots of people are bad about backups. Apple can't keep people from dropping their phones into toilets but they can do something about OS upgrades that remove data from phones without telling users, who don't back up, what is about to happen.

99 cents is too much to protect your data? Really?

For 99 cents, you get 20 GB of iCloud storage.

For $3.99, you get 200 GB of iCloud storage. Oh, and you can cancel/downgrade it at any time and get a pro-rated refund.

Your data is YOUR responsibility, not Apple's. Personal responsibility. Look it up.

You don't have a computer? Actually, the terms of the iOS state that having a computer is a requirement of using the device.

You're on vacation? Irrelevant, you can still backup using wi-fi.

You're lazy? That's a personal problem.

You're forgetful? That's a personal problem. Set up a reminder in your calendar, or turn on the Automatic iCloud backups.

Apple can do something about it; they've posted the official procedure on how to update your iOS, which clearly states to make a backup.

Apple's is not a babysitter. You're an adult. Act like one.

I didn't lose anything. I back up kind of obsessively, down to an off-site mirror of my hard drive. But I provide a lot of informal help to friends, neighbors etc. - like you all do here, only in the corporeal world - and I am dismayed by how many smart, otherwise responsible people have simply never thought through the risks of carrying around a fragile, portable device that contains the only copy of irreplaceable information. I teach them how to back up, and encourage it, and remind them of it, but I'm only helping 10 people a year. These people exist by the thousands, probably hundreds of thousands or millions, and while it's easy to blame their behavioral deficiencies for their own problems, it's only that. Easy. The right thing, knowing that these people exist - not quite as easy, but right - is to keep them from getting themselves into this kind of trouble. Kind of like putting up Jersey barriers down the middle of interstates. Middling effort, big reward.

John Dorsey wrote:

otherwise responsible people have simply never thought through the risks of carrying around a fragile, portable device that contains the only copy of irreplaceable information.

Well said and sums up people's ignorance as being bulletproof. People also drink drive, because nothing bad will ever happen to them. Should they complain to the automobile manufacturer or alcohol company after they cripple themselves? Or take steps to avoid such outcomes?

So Apple should hold everybody's hand and guide them through what are hard times for a minuscule percentage of iOS upgraders? I would rather them spend their time creating and improving iOS and OSXs and even more devices.

Pete

petermac87 wrote:

Well said and sums up people's ignorance as being bulletproof. People also drink drive, because nothing bad will ever happen to them. Should they complain to the automobile manufacturer or alcohol company after they cripple themselves?

Oh, gosh no. But manufacturers - knowing that drivers will get into accidents no matter how often they are reminded to be attentive, or not to drink, or to pull over when they're drowsy - include air bags and seat belts (*and* seat belts), and specially designed compartments that crumple just so, to protect passengers from these inevitabilities, often caused by the drivers' own negligence or recklessness. I suppose that the mfrs aren't quite so thoughtful, inasmuch as most of these are mandated by law, but I'm grateful for that. It sounds as though you are saying that protecting people from themselves is never warranted either by sound business practice or basic thoughtfulness.

What would have happened to those photos if you lost your device. Or it was stolen? Or it got run over by the car?

And I believe the question you were asking was about Photo Stream. And again, my response is the same. Photo Stream was never intended as a personal storage facility for photos. It was designed to hold the last 30 days of photos (in iCloud), so that it could share those photos among devices, and give you time to import them from a single device to a photos library on your computer or on a cloud service like DropBox. Although Photo Stream could keep up to 1000 photos on your device, the iCloud version of Photo Stream only contained 30 days. This has always been the way that Photo Stream worked.

When you upgraded to iOS 8, the Photo Stream on your camera was "turned off" and then reloaded down from iCloud. Unfortunately, all that iCloud had was the last 30 days worth, and anything older than that (on the Photo Stream only) would have been lost.

If the photos were on your Camera Roll, then they would be in the Collections folder if they were older than 30 days old.

Sorry about your lost photos....

GB

Yeah, I get that Photostream is not really a backup system, and that Apple encourages backing up, and that they're not anyone's nanny, and we're all responsible for our own mistakes. All that. It's why I back up all the time and why I (knock on wood) haven't lost important data in 30+ years of personal computing. I can see I'm not going to gain any converts here so I'll quit, saying just one more time that in light of this talk about Apple making these uncomfortable changes to accommodate the persistent wishes of its customers - even when customers have only themselves to blame (e.g. wanting to recover a deleted photo they haven't got backed up anywhere) - it rings hollow to defend Apple's failure to warn its customers that an iOS upgrade *will cause* certain customers to irretrievably lose data on their phones, if they haven't backed it up. In one case Apple is defended for changing the OS to protect customers from commonplace dopey decisions, and in the other Apple is defended from *not* protecting customers commonplace dopey decisions, because - well, why should they.

Sorry, but there are two different issues here. Backing up and importing photos. The part of this thread that I have been responding to involves the Photo Stream. Even if someone had done a backup, the photos over 30 days old in the Photo Stream would not have been retrievable if they had not been imported to a computer or cloud service like Dropbox when they were still "Camera Roll" photos.

Photo Stream in not only not "really" a backup up system, it is not a storage system either.

It is unfortunate that people did not seem to understand the product itself. But the way that Photo Stream works is the way is has worked since the beginning. Thirty days of photos in the cloud - period. Anything else is not going to be recoverable. It is long gone. And has nothing to do with the update. If a person had to restore their device for any reason, the Photo Stream would be rebuilt on their device with only the last 30 days of photos. The remaining photos in Photo Stream that were still showing on their device are nowhere but on their device.

So, this has nothing to do with iOS 8. It has to do with not understanding what Photo Stream is (was), how Photo Stream works or worked, and what Camera Roll is (was) and how Camera Rolled works or worked.

However, I also agree with you that at the moment the Upgrade Now button is tapped, it would be a good idea to present a warning screen reminding people to back up first, and (for iOS 7 to iOS 8), reminding people that the Photo Stream will be deleted from the Device (as is down when an iCloud account is deleted). I would go as far as saying that once you click Upgrade Now, and the "Backup" warning is displayed, that the user have the option to click on Continue or Back Up Now.

Because you are correct that harping about harping about backing up isn't getting us anywhere. There isn't a lot we can do to convince people to "just do it", so we will continue to get people wanting to retrieve data they have never backed up when a device is lost, stolen, or accidentally destroyed. But, an Update is a controlled environment, and if the software can intervene and convince a few more people to back up before upgrading, then everyone's life would be easier!

Cheers,

GB