How to get photos from damaged iPhone 4?
Appreciate any help!
Background
iPhone 4 fell in the water and daughter plugged it in and turned it on...
Brought phone to repair tech and he cleaned up water damage, and tried replacing screen/digitizer.
Touch screen/digitizer still does not work (tried touching all areas) and the screen is locked on passcode screen. Display works (calls, text msgs, wi-fi working - shows pop ups on lock screen) and buttons work, but am unable to use phone.
Repair tech said it may be the digitizer fuse/connector to motherboard, but doesn't know anyone who fixes this.
Also brought phone to Genius Bar and they took apart phone and repositioned screen, but could not correct the problem.
I do not care about the phone, but there are 6+ months of important photos/vids that were not backed up successfully. I can not get around the locked screen to get the photos uploaded through iTunes (prompts to enter passcode on phone) or iCloud (thought it was selected to upload automatically - everything except the photos was backed up on iCloud).
On the iCloud Photos screen, some of the missing photos do appear as blank placeholders (with date and size). When I try to open them, I receive "Cannot Load Photo" message and then another message to please report error to Apple. The phone is on family-sharing, and I can access the last few weeks of photos from another device via Photo Stream.
Questions:
How do I get these photos off of phone?
- Does iCloud service have ability to remotely upload the photos?
- Should I look into restoring fuse/connection to motherboard to fix digitizer so I can get to photos?
- Look at a data recovery service?
- Any option to restore photos from a "Recovery Mode" process?
Any other ideas?
iPhone 4, iOS 7