Photos in iMessages/SMS are missing

This is still rather disappointing that such a big even exists. I really hope the fix is actually able to recover our photos. Since I keep all my attached photos with the messages they belong to. If they come out with a fix that only prevents this from happening in the future rather than actually returning our photos I would be fairly upset. Also, I only say this because I checked my phones backup through a third party backup extractor and there are no signs of the missing attachments. Howeve, the Apple rep I spoke to did say that these photos are still there just stored in some other pattern. So let's just sit back and crow our fingers.

That's interesting you say the attachments aren't there on yours, I did the same thing you did. I know there are probably hundreds out there, the extractor I used was by Reincubate which I will say works very well, and with that, I was indeed able to see the photos I know were in the messages. I didn't check each and every one, but certainly 10 - 15 I looked at I know I didn't save to my camera roll. I keep them in the SMS messages to more or less sort them so I know where they came from.

If you have another IOS device that may be on an older release, might be good to check there and see if your photos or attachments are there, if so, I'd do a backup from there and verify they're in there.

Best of Luck to us all

--John

This also happened to my and it is incredibly frustrating. All my conversations including pictures from years ago got deleted and that is unacceptable. I cannot recover or have a history of these conversations, personal information and sentimental pictures which will never see again.

I back up to my computer but images in imessages won't back up for some reason. This seems complicated and apparently there is not a solution for this.

What has everyone been doing? Has anybody been lucky enough to recover all their lost data? This ***** please help

Last week Apple contacted me to get some more info and some diags from my phone.

One thing i did notice and confirm that some others said is that if you go onto your Mac and go into messaging all the pictures are still there int he cloud and you can download and save them. This worked on my Mac mini. Not sure if there is a way to access that from a PC or not but at least on a Mac you can still get to the pics and vids.

yea that 8.1.3 did nothing for another because there was not fixed pushed for it yet. they are still in the investigative stage. Being in the IT field i know that problems like this that don't effect a large number of people can take a long time to figure out. But trust me they are looking into it. THey have me install a diagnostic tool on my phone and send them a 30mb log file so yea... they are looking.

I have the same problem. My photos and videos changed to ?'s about a week ago. I believe it occurred when I activated icloud on my iphone for the first time. I, too, have a few years of texts stored and all of the photos with those texts have disappeared. I looked at my settings and noticed that within the message setting, video messages were set to expire after 2 minutes. I didnt change that setting, but I wonder if it had something to do with icloud automatically changing it with activation. They are probably in the cloud somewhere but I have now idea how to find them.

Well, I am not tech savvy at all, but I went into settings and turned on icloud drive and also turned it on where it says to upload new photos and send them to icloud devices when connected to wifi. I just wanted a back up for my photos but really dont understand any of it.

all those settings for photo library and upload photos and stuff have nothing to do with this problem or the photos in SMS/iMessage.

those are stored and handled in another way on the device. the iDrive/iCloud photo backup and sync or what ever is only for the photos in your photo library.

Far as the deleted after 2min and so on that's only for videos and voice sent in sms/imessage nothing to do with photos.

*Update*

i think my phone is special lol. Apple contacted me again last night because the developers wanted more diags from me. so uploaded more stuff for them. Looks like maybe they are on to something.

Thanks for the info and update from Apple. Yes, the only photos and videos missing for me were imessages or text messagesk to and from other people. Nothing in the permanent photos. But I thought it was interesting that my setting said to expire video messages after 2 minutes and i dont believe it was always set that way.

thats new in iOS 8. i dont remember what the default setting for that is after you update but it may be 2min. its only because videos take up a lot of space and if apple didnt do that people would complain that there phone is full after a couple weeks lol.

I could not reproduce the issue with the Apple debug tool. The issue exists on my phone but I couldn't get it to reproduce again so my log files were useless to Apple. After a certain date, my phone won't do it again. Unfortunately, that date was last month (Jan 9th for my phone) and I've had my phone for 2+ years so everything prior to last month is randomly missing. Everything after last month is still there in chronological order.

While I was running the Apple debug tool, I could not get the issue to reoccur so my log files were useless. I tried everything from sending and receiving SMS and iMessage pics right at the point where my battery would fail (random discharging due to my old battery so it drops in charge by huge increments) to doing the same with my phone fully charged and connected to a power source. Nothing seemed to make it fail again but the current failure is still there. This bug is frustrating to say the least. Hope the logs that are useful are helping the Apple engineers.

no your logs were not useless if you still have the blank boxes / ? in on your phone.

thats the state mine is in and trust me with the way they walk you through to go into the messages and click on one of the photos and then back out and sending those logs tell them alot. thats all the did and they wanted more.

and this problem doesnt seem to keep happening really that iv noticed. it happened once back on Jan 9th or 11th or when ever i posted first and then thats it. hasn't done it again. but the phone still thinks the photo is there just there is no data to display do it just shows the ? or blank boxes. but if you click on it it tells you the file name. im thinking either the photos are gone from the phones and the file location/path is still there so its still looking for it. or the photos got moved or the path got changed somehow a little bit for where its looking for the photos. im thinking more something corrupted the file location on the phones.

File corruption on the phone is what I'm leaning towards. Since the pics still appear on other users Apple MAC's or iPads (I only have an iPhone, no other Apple devices), I'm guessing somehow the phone paths or location algorithms were corrupted once. No clue what caused it but hopefully Apple is getting some useful data from those log files from other users and have a lead into this.

yea me too. on my mac mini they come up fine. on my ipad they arnt there. but... i think thats more my fault because i dont use my ipad much so its either not on or out of date so i bet they never loaded on it. but im happy they are on my mac.

Same issue here. Iphone message photos that were recd/sent prior to Saturday, 2/7/15 are all missing. My messages display the ? w/ the IMG_####.jpg file name instead of the photos. All photos that I've taken since Monday, 2/9/15 are still there... for now. BUT, all of the photos that are missing from my iPhone messages are displayed in my IPad messages.

PS. IPhone 5s, AT&T, iOS 8.1.2