Photos in iMessages/SMS are missing

This started happening to me on 1/9/15. I didn't upgrade or change anything on my iPhone. I'm still using an iPhone 5, 64GB (with about 35GB of free space available) with iOS 8.1.2. All the workarounds listed here didn't work for me either (iMessage off/on, reset network settings, hard reset, soft reset, etc). I don't have any other device associated to my iPhone/iCloud account. I don't own a MAC or an iPad. From what I've read here, hopefully the images are still available since others have said that their images show up on their iPad's and/or MAC's iMessage windows. I also sent a message to Apple Support complaining about the same bug. Hopefully this gets fixed soon!!

Hi Whitogreen!

I can understand your frustration when it comes to pictures that seems to be missing and not loading correctly.

You mentioned that you use Photos in iCloud.

If you go into settings>iCloud>photos on your iPhone, do you have iCloud photo library activated?

This is a great feature of having all your pictures uploaded to iCloud. In here, do you have the "Optimize iPhone storage" (this might be a little different in your language).

If you have it turned on, can your turn it off, and say yes if it asks you if you want to download full versions of your pictures.

Just downloading 8.1.3 - not confident it will fix our problem though as the bug isn't listed in the fixes

Fingers crossed

Nope the 8.1.3 didn't work for me. Please sort it out Apple.

Same response here. iOS 8.1.3 didn't fix this issue for me either. Hoping that 8.2.0 (or 8.1.4 if that's next) will address this issue. C'mon Apple, fix this problem.

yup same. just installed 8.1.3 and no change. still all my photos in imessage/sms are missing from before the date it happened.

ugh..soooo many pics i lost.

I have this same missing photos issue, came here looking for help.. Very disappointing.

Apple, please address this. It's hardly an annoying bug.

Yep, same here, upgraded to 8.1.3 and no change...

Apple,

at least address the issue here and acknowledge that it is an issue and keep us informed.

Would like to know if you have at least identified the root cause of the issue and when you anticipate rolling out a fix for it.

Just an FYI for some of the posters here, this has nothing at all to do with iphone 5, 5s, vs iPhone 6, this is a software bug... I had the same issue on my iphone 5 before upgrading to iphone 6. Seems to have happened around IOS 8 upgrade from IOS 7. Possibly IOS 8.0.1.

I'm having the same issue. It's so frustrating! I had a client send me photos for a project I am working on, then when I finally finished other business and was ready to begin this project, the photos had disappeared! (In about a week) I can't call him back and ask to re-send. I'm hosed. Please Apple, look into this! You can't sell us on the product and then ignore an issue that would automatically disqualify the product from real usage. I'm a loyal Apple product user, have been for over 30 years. This is just not right.

MJ you'll be able to see the pictures on your Mac in iMessage

I recently checked my messages on my iPhone 6 and found all of my attached photos deleted. It happened overnight, as I was able to access these photos last night. This is an odd case, I have never seen anything like this. I hope these photos are saved on Apple's servers and hopefully will be able to restore these photos to our phones. I backed up my phone and used a iPhone backup extractor to see if I could get the photos back just in case the photos were unlinked. No dice. The photos are deleted. Also I gained back like 1 GB of space on my phone. I checked a few days ago and I had ~39 GB left, now I have ~40 GB left. Apple somehow managed to delete our SMS photos.... Please fix this. Or give us an explanation.

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

I haven't changed SIM and I'm quite certain that iMessage has been turned off and on throughout the 2+ years I've had my iPhone-5 and I only started having this issue on Jan 9th of this year. However, my phone battery has definitely run its course. I lose reliable charge at about 28%. From there, it drops to 11% to sometimes lower or all the way to 1% prior to just dying. I don't know how that could affect it but I'm also not sure what's causing this bug.

Now that you mention this. Right before I lost my attachments, my phone had ran out of batteries. I actually let this happen because I usually let my battery drain out once a month to maintain the battery life. This might actually be why it happened. Can anyone else confirm this?

Just as an FYI,

I was just contacted by Apple to request some additional information on the issue, so at least it sounds like they are researching the issue, which is good for us.

The initial customer service rep basically made it sound like it was my fault for not saving the attachment to my camera roll, I informed her that , probably similar to you, I keep most of the attachments I receive in the sms's to keep them sorted based on who sent them, if it's something I want to share with another person, then I'll save it to the camera roll.

Anyway, just thought I would share with you that Apple is starting to reach out and gather some information so hopefully with all of the information, they can debug and deploy a fix ... sure would like to have access to those photos again

--John