A friend changed my daughters wallpaper on her iPad mini and now we can't find the picture to put it back? Any ideas?

After setting it as a wallpaper you can delete the photo. Much like you can set a contact button photo then delete the original.

so it is stored in the meantime in "never never land" (still was somewhere, just not where you can get to it without "thinking happy thoughts")

🙂

My Granddaughter initiated a FacetIme call to her mother from the backseat of her maternal GreatGrandmother's car with an iPad she had never held in her life = at 4 years old (thinking happy thoughts!)

forgot to say it took a couple of minutes with ZERO coaching

When you set an image as your wallpaper image you can then delete it from the Photos app and it will remain as the wallpaper image (I've just tried it, taking a new photo, setting it as the wallpaper, deleting it from Photos, and it remained as the wallpaper, including after doing rebooting the iPad) - so it could (unless you know otherwise) have been deleted at any time between setting it as the wallpaper and now.

You hadn't emailed the photo to anyone and still have the email in the Sent folder of your email account, or messaged it someone and still have the message with it in ?

Aloha King Penguin.

Thanks for taking a look. Whether you have success or not please head up to the Lounge so I can thank you for answering my Batcall.

Thank you. Bob.

If you do find an old backup to restore to, you could first take a backup of the current state of your iPad and copy it so that you can restore back to it after you've taken a copy of the photo - on a Mac backups are stored under :

Mac:~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

The "~" represents your Home folder. If you don't see Library in your Home folder, hold Option and click the Go menu.

So after taking a new backup copy that folder somewhere else so that you have a copy of it (e.g. external drive, flash-drive) just in case it gets overwritten after restoring to an old backup or by time machine.

If you find and restore a backup with the photo in it you could copy the photo off the iPad (on a Mac Image Capture, iPhoto or Aperture should be able to copy off Camera Roll photos), copy your new backup back into the backup folder, restore to it, and then email the photo to yourself and save it from the Mail app to the Camera Roll album.

I'M afraid I don't have a lot more to suggest beyond what the guys have. You said it's a personal photo, did you take it with the iPad or with another camera? I know photos I take on my camera can languish on the memory card for months or years.

For photos saved to my iPad I do save them by dragging them off the iPad's camera roll file, but I know that's not something people ordinarily do. You could poke around in your photos folder on your computer and see if there are some synced photos there. I honestly can't recall if they are saved or not. (WHen I first started with my iPad I synced photos onto my iPad but stopped doing that since they can't be deleted, although I do back up the camera roll every once in a while...I save photos from an app and want another copy)

You can try the idea of the older backup and see if it's there. I think that's pretty much your last Hail Mary I'm afraid.

I Can't imagine how the wallpaper photo could have gotten deleted unless it was never saved to the device in the first place. Did you look in the Recently Deleted album in the photos app?

EDIT - I apologize. I only read the first page of this discussion before I jumped in. Ignore my remarks.

I Have two nieces and have gone through the 'end of the world because something changes' with both of them. It's both frustrating and amusing the level of tragedy assigned to something simple.

Its not finding the old photo but, my oldiest niece loves PhotoBooth. She would get my iPad and play with all the filters And save all these photos. Maybe if you can get her playing with that and having fun making herself look silly, you can use one of those photos to replace the missing wallpaper and she'll move on and forget about the tragedy of a missing photo.

I'M not making light of the problem, so apologizes if it feels that way or comes across that way, just offering a work around or maybe a way to fix things.