iOS 8 camera roll is missing!!!

Well at least you're open minded about it.

You could be bitter and childish about it, but you chose the high road.

Hey y'all

I lost a lot of photos after upgrading to iOS 8. I know photostream and cameraroll has been replaced by recently added, and that older photos can be found in collections, but some hundreds of photos are still not to be found anywhere. Does anyone else have this problem? Does anyone have a solution? I just wrote to Apple about it, so I'm hoping they know what's going on. Btw, I'm a 20 year old woman, so I'm usually a complete imbecile when it comes to phones:)

Marie

Do you have a recent backup that you can restore to? That is the only way you are going to get those photos back.

Any time you do a major upgrade - especially to a new iOS, you should be backing up your device.

What photos are missing? Were they in your Camera Roll, Photo Stream, or somewhere else?

Cheers,

GB

Such a quick response! Thanks

I do have a semi-recent backup. I didn't back up this time because the photos are kinda whatever. I usually back up otherwise. So no major disaster, it just would've been nice to have them. There are only 153 photos in Recently Added and there should be well above 1000 (waste of space, I know). The missing photos were from both Camera Roll and Photostream, and it seems like it's (almost) all photos from august till now that have gone lost. I can still find older photos in Collections, but I'm guessing they're still intact because I also have them in an iCloud stream.

So yeah! Here's a weird thing I just noticed though: when I open Instagram and do as if I wanted to post a picture from my phone, it says that there are 3146 photos in the folder Recently Added. I can see all of my old photos incl photos that has been shared with me in iCloud streams. Maybe they'll disappear too though, once Instagram is updated

Marie:)

Hi everyone

I'm trying to understand how this new photo app is working and I'm failing miserably so far.

I understand the whole Recent Added and Recently Deleted albums. I can see photos in the Moments section when selecting Photo's from the bottom left.

What I'm trying to understand is how do you know which photo's are on your phone and which are in the cloud. For example. Before I updated to iOS8 I deleted some pictures. After updating I went into the Photo app and slowly 17 pictures populated the Recently added album. I know for a fact these have come from the Photo Stream that was. They also appear in the Moments section. So how on earth do you ascertain if the picture your looking at is on your device or in the cloud?

Many thanks in advance

I am so upset with this entire update the force me to erase everything to get it and now is been 4 hours waiting fo it. reading how bad it is scares the **** out of me. I will forget this mess and go for Samsung on next upgrade

It isn't just an inconvenience, it actually breaks functionality within other Apps that used the Camera Roll, such as Instagram. Now Instagram only loads out of "Recently Added", which doesn't actually store photos in chronological order and of course doesn't show all photos. Since I'm an artist and use Instagram as my portfolio, and need to load photos in a particular sequence and out of my entire collection, Instagram has now become unusable because of iOS8.

I also store reference photographs, photos I may not have taken, and those end up in random (from my point of view) Collections based on their original date, instead of in the order I stored them. So, "Collections" are useless to me, and Recently Added is flawed since it doesn't maintain sequence for some reason and doesn't show all photos.

When you launch the Photo app you then need to click the Photos icon at the bottom left to see all your photos. Mine are all there by date. Looking under the Albums view does not show everything.

That's correct but what you can't tell is which ones are on your phone and which have been pulled in from cloud. I have pictures in the Photos section that I know have come from the cloud but you can't tell.

Then what about when you take a picture. It must upload to the cloud as before but what are you looking at in Photos > Moments ?

I see what they were doing but they should of put a cloud or something next to them so you can tell.

Well, if you look in the Photos themselves, click on a Year to go to Collections, then click on a Date Range to go to Moments, do you see the photos that are not in Recently Added there? That may be where the count is coming from on Instagram. If they are showing in the Photos group, then unless you need to import them to iPhoto or your Photos Folder on a PC, then you should be OK to go.

If you do use iPhoto, you can open iPhoto with your device hooked up, then select your device (which shows on the sidebar). You can then click on "Already Imported" and select photos to "re-import" (although that implies that they are already on your computer).

As long as they are still showing on the device, there is a way to get them backed up on your computer.

If they are not showing at all under Photos, then you may want to restore to your backup to get them back.

Cheers,

GB

With iOS 8, Apple has collapsed any distinction between photographs captured by and resident on an iOS device, and photographs that are represented in the cloud. The camera roll and photo stream albums have been eliminated, and their contents combined under the Collections tab. If you tried to keep a reasonably carefully curated camera roll album like I always did, then searching for a particular photo now means searching through 1000 photostream photos as well as the 100 or 200 camera roll photos - Photostream photos which, if you are like me, will include photographs that were never taken on the iPhone; or were taken by other members of your family whose photos are also loaded to the same photo stream. Oh, and also any photos that you might also have synced to your device via iPhoto. The upshot is that searching through one's Collection for a particular photo is an exercise in persistence and patience now.

There also appears to be no way to delete a photograph from the local device, without also deleting it from photostream; and vice versa.

It is a very poor decision from a usability standpoint, and those of us who are upset by it should go to Apple feedback to register our concern.

Well, all photos that you take with your device are in Photo Stream (in the cloud) for a month. So they are in both places (the device and the cloud). The only other photos you will see in Recently Added are photos taken on other devices that are in Photo Stream.

We don't have a lot of info about this at this point, but here is how I'm thinking it will work (and for the sake of simplicity, we will talk about one device):

Before, when you took photos on your device, they showed up in Camera Roll and in Photo Stream

After 30 days, the photos were deleted from Photo Stream in the Cloud, but if you did not turn Photo Stream off in the interim on your device (which you wouldn't normally do), then your Photo Stream on your device could show up to 1000 photos. However, if you did turn Photo Stream off and then back on again, only the photos for the current month would reload into Photo Stream (because that was all that was still in the Cloud for Photo Stream)

Camera Roll photos would stay in the Camera Roll until you deleted them

I'm thinking that now, the Recently Added photos will hold both Camera Roll and Photo Stream photos for the current month (or the last 30 days), and then they will be moved into the the Albums with a separate tag for each date on which you have taken photos. The Album view hierarchy is:

Years

Collections: which has photos grouped by date ranges (not sure how the grouping here is determined)

Moments: which has photos grouped by a single date (all photos taken on that date)

What I'm not sure of is whether or not all photos that are not imported will still show up to be imported even when they are no longer in the Recently Added folder, but I'm guessing that even when they have been moved out of the Recently Added, they will still import if they do not exist in the photo library when the device is hooked up.

So, as you can see, a lot of this is, at this point, just surmising, and as we go, we will be able to either acquire or will ascertain more exact info on how this all is going to work. But hope that makes the structure a little clearer for now!

Cheers,

GB

John Dorsey wrote:

There also appears to be no way to delete a photograph from the local device, without also deleting it from photostream; and vice versa.

This is correct, and it is in direct response to many users who did not like having to delete the same photo in several different places. It was confusing for people to have both a Camera Roll and a Photo Stream when both of them (from the individual device standpoint) were the same thing (Photo Stream was just more temporary).

So, now, all current photos, whether taken on your device or on any other device that is signed onto the same iCloud account that your device is signed onto (and which have Photo Stream turned on), will show in the Recently Added folder. We will have to see, but I'm thinking that at the end of the month, they will go into the Albums folder....(looking forward to the end of September to see how this works!)

Cheers,

GB

Heretofore, photostream was a handy thing to have available – I could look at photos that I had taken with other devices, real cameras perhaps, or get a look at what kinds of silly photos my kids were taking with the old iOS devices I let them play with. But photo stream is just that – a stream, a completely unedited, uncurated collection of everything from everywhere. It was nice to have handy, but it was certainly not something I wanted to look at, or deal with, 100% of the time. In iOS 8, I don't have a choice. If I want to find a photograph that I took more than 30 days ago, I have to sit sift through all this chaff to find the one thing that I am looking for. Plus as I said, all photos from any other events I have synced back to the phone. It used to be really easy; now it is really hard. Whatever grand plan Apple may have for us and our photos going forward, they don't seem to have thought very hard about how people actually use their iOS cameras.

Time will tell of course. This is 8.0, and things can change. Also, third parties can come up with solutions to. It's just a shame to have to go searching around for a solution to a problem that didn't exist until this "upgrade".

I agree that people were confused that they had to delete photos twice in order to get them to go away completely; but I think an awful lot of people are also going to be confused when they discover that photos that they have taken on their phones start moving from one album to another without their doing anything to effect that. Before iOS 8, Photos stayed on your phone where you put them. Under iOS 8, it's anybody's guess where you might find particular photo on a particular day!