Photos in iMessages/SMS are missing

Having the same issue on iPhone 5. I went to the Apple store and they did a iCloud backup restore and it didn't work. They said a few people had been in with the same issue. I think that since photos take up a lot of space that they might do this from time to time and just never address the issue. Oh, and for some reason the only iCloud backup I had available was after the problem started, the other older back ups were gone. If you get an important txt message picture be sure to save it to camera roll and back up on PC. I've turned off my iCloud and iMessage and going old school with PC backups.

Same exact problem here, all the attachments in text messages gone, not the ones store on the photostream but the text messages.

I did all the "workarounds":

- Reset and Hard reset

- Reset Network Settings

- IMessage on/off

- Restore from an older backup....

same thing.... Does it look like this to all of you?

THANK YOU APPLE FOR DELETING ALL MY PHOTOS WITH NO WARNING, YOUR SOFTWARE KEEPS GETTING WORSE AND WORSE

Same problem here. I switched from a 5S to an iPhone 6 about a month ago. Saturday night I looked at photos on my phone and went to bed. On Sunday I went to my moms and as she doesn't have a cell phone, I went to show her the pictures my sister sends me of her kids. This is the main way my mom sees pictures of her grand kids. Well unfortunately for us, I went to show her and there were not any pictures on my phone. Two years of photos just gone. I never saved them on my photo stream because they are in my messages. Figured I would save space and only have them in one location. Well bad decision on my part.

Spoke to Apple Care today and they were clueless about this problem. Doubt this will be fixed anytime soon. Apple please come up with an update for this as it isn't fair for people to lose hundreds of pictures...

For me personally what happened is today I went to the apple store to fix my phone. They backed everything up to my iCloud. then told me I needed a whole new phone. It was supposed to be simple, just login to Icloud and everurging would be there. I was told all my messages and pictures would be reloaded onto the phone. I lave lost everything: pictures, videos, and iMessage pictues. All that is left when I go into my gallery or old messages is this..

Please tell me you know how to fix it.

Today I went to the Apple Store to fix what I thought was a simple problem. I was informed that I'd be getting a new phone and that all of my information was backed up onto iCloud. Upon reactivating the new phone all I have to do is sign onto my iCloud and all of my photo gallery text messages and text messages photos would be put back on my phone. After doing the phone set up and going into my gallery and text messages I found that all of the photos and videos were gone. It now looks like this.

How can I get all my photos back? Please help.

Quick Update:

I usually have my Mac laptop up with Messages running on it. As you know, it will receive the same messages you send/receive on your iPhone. I thought all my old photos would be there too, but they have all disappeared as well except for the last few.

Messages is supposed to archive all old photos to a directory called ~/Library/Messages/Attachments. On my mac, this was a 0 byte file that was created back in Jan 2014. As a result, none of the old photos got saved on my Messages app either. I looked at a Time Machine Backup and it has been the case since September (no earlier backups available). So, it's unclear how long this issue has been going on for my Messages app and how related it is to my iPhone problem.

In any case, if any of you use Messages, you may be able to recover your photos in that directory provided it didn't get trashed like mine did. I moved the file and created a new Attachments directory. Upon relaunch, Messages started properly storing new photos in there again.

Either there was a really terrible bug in the Apple software or something malicious has happened.

P.S. I'm running OS 10.9.5 Mavericks. There is a thread of people with this problem on Yosemite here:

No pictures are shown in Message om Mac

This seems like a pretty seriously terrible bug. I will be talking again to AppleCare on Wednesday and I hope they can escalate this.

Yep,

Same issue here, have had it for about 3 weeks now. I think it happened between upgrading from 8.0.1->8.1.1. Text messages before 8.0.1 seem to be affected, text messages on 8.1.2 seem to be ok, there's a window between 8.0.1 where all of my pictures in text messages have changes to question marks. Similar to a previous poster, I spoke to Apple customer support and she said that Apple deems the issue "not widespread" so won't directly address it, I disagree, there are posts all over the internet about the same issue.

She did encourage me to send the issue here, and I encourage you all to do the same.. maybe if they get enough feedback about the same issue, they'll start addressing it.

http://www.apple.com/support/feedback/

vwayJul 25, 2015 8:21 AM Re: Photos in iMessages/SMS are missing
Re: Photos in iMessages/SMS are missingin response to vway

Got a new iphone 6 yesterday and this link solved my problem- i had only a question mark where an imcoming message pic should be.

i had to log off my old iphone and my ipad - turning find my phone OFF,

https://malacube.wordpress.com/tag/iphone-6-imessage-pictures/

xninjax, out of interest did any of these happen?

• Your phone ran out of battery
• You changed SIM
• You turned iMessage off and on

They are the only things I can think caused it for me but there doesn't seem to be one specific thing that causes it.

The images are definitely still out there in the cloud somewhere as they can be seen in iMessage on a Mac

Wow dude you've got issues - get a Samsung!

Couple of points

• 53,000 views is tiny when compared to the fact 1 billion iOS devices have been sold
• Read the thread - Apple have been phoning people on this thread and getting them to run tests - they are actively trying to fix it
• I don't think there have been 3 iOS updates since this problem arose
• They are beta testing with the public - as mentioned this effects a tiny number of people
• Luckily I haven't been effected by the other issues you list!

I am having the same problem with iPhone 6 Plus with iOS 8.1. The only difference is all of my pictures are missing. I thought it may have been something to do with me turning on Photos in iCloud(Beta). However I have turned it off and the pictures have not returned. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I just noticed this happened to me so I downloaded the lastest update. I'd be procrastinating. Didn't help. All photos from 3-5 (approx) days ago are gone. :---( A big icon is there with 3396.jpg or something similar but the photo doesn't appear.

How did you fix this? Did you get your text photos back?

Thanks

Same issue here.

I was using 8.0.2 (iphone 6) and noticed the problem. Upgraded to 8.1.2 and that didn't help. Tried all the various tricks with resetting the phone, reactivating iMessage, etc. The messages app is only using 52 megs of data now - either the photos all got dereferenced or deleted. Need help!

I am having the same problem on a iPhone 5s and 6 plus iOS 8.1.1 and 8.1.2. Looks like it started around December 12th for me. All text is there just no images from any messages, just ? and image file name. I did everything from the forum and nothing worked. Also reset phone and restored from old back up and did not work. In doing so noticed some of my recent backups didn't show up in the cloud to use. I talked with apple support online via chat, then phone supervisor and then advanced supervisor. They are aware that this is a problem for a significant number of people and have a group of engineers working on it. They said a fix hopefully should be in the next update. We'll see.

Same Problem here.

I haven't done 8.1.2 update yet. 95% of my messages attachements have disappeared. All my friends, family, girlfriend pictures lost.. Thank you Apple for this nice christmas present.