how to recover photos on Apple Watch if iphone died?

Hi

Photos can only be synced to Apple Watch from the paired iPhone. They cannot be synced in the other direction or otherwise exported from your watch.

Even if this had been possible, the photos that are stored on your watch have been automatically resized to smaller pixel dimensions, for display on the watch's smaller screen.

The best that you could do is to take photos (using a camera or another phone) of the photos on your watch.

When you are ready to do so, before being able to pair your watch to a replacement iPhone, you will first need to erase your watch manually:

• On your watch: when viewing the time, go to the Home screen (via a single press of the Digital Crown) > Settings (cog icon) > General > Reset > Erase all Content and Settings.
• And then re-pair it by following the standard process:

  Set up your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Was this the Camera Roll, or a folder that was synced from the computer? I've used photo syncing on my watch in the past, and I've always synced photos from my phone that were synced from the computer. Otherwise, I'm not aware of any 3rd party software that would connect to the watch to allow for restoring photos.

Okay. Photos in the camera roll should be routinely imported to the computer, or stored in iCloud. One should also be creating regular backups of the device, but looking at your post, it seems that you had not created an iCloud backup. Keeping all of the data in a single location is dangerous, especially since there is no way to recover things from the watch. If you were syncing to the watch, it seems these would be photos that had been around for a bit, is that correct? Or were you just taking these photos and they were syncing to the watch as you go?

Without a backup of the device, there is no known way to recover the photos.

Photos that appear on the iPhone are ones that are synced from the computer. http://help.apple.com/watch/#/apd5c3c53180 From the Apple Watch User Guide.

Chabbita wrote:

It is hard to believe and accept that there are no workarounds.

There is no access to the file system of the watch. Unfortunately, that is the way it is.