Photos in iMessages/SMS are missing

I also spoke with a rep yesterday and they told me they are aware of this issue and it is a known issue in ios 8. This bug is similar to th ringtones disappearing bug. I'm glad they're looking into this. And hopefully none of our attachments are actually lost. They also told me it's best not to delete any messages atm.

I think the battery dying might have caused the problem for me but I couldn't be sure at all.

Great news it sounds like Apple are looking into it anyhow!

I also saw 'Apple today seeded the fifth beta of iOS 8.2 to developers'

Fingers crossed.

Just keeping everyone in the loop here.

Apple engineering contacted me last night and I spent about an hour on the phone with them.

They provided me with a debugging profile and installed it on my phone and sent them logs via a secure apple ftp site to help them debug.

Also, it sounds like the issue is also being observed internally by Apple employees although they have not been able to consistently reproduce the issue.

I'm glad they are actively working on the issue and debugging, but since it doesn't sound like they have a good grasp on the issue just yet, I wouldn't hold my breath for the fix to be in the pending 8.2 release.

Still hoping for a fix in one of the upcoming releases

--John

Thanks for all these updates guys. Sounds like it won't be long before there's a fix, although probably not in the next release.

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

Same problem with photos disappearing in iMessage after battery was drained completely and phone shut down.

This has now happened to me a second time!

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

That doesnt sound like the same problem Jorgewc.

If you Conversations are missing also then it sounds like this setting where anything pat a year get deleted.

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.

I have mine to keep them forever so that is not the case

Checked and no luck 😟

ok thats weird. so even the conversations are missing along with the Pics and Vids?

that is correct. Everything is missing. I still have my contact names saved but not our message, picture or vid history. Years of personal information lost.