I am pissed off (Camera Roll Problem)

This might be a dumb question, but did you have the "photo stream" option turned on when you took them? Do you have any other ios device?

It also says that the icloud backup happens when the iphone is connected to a power source and wifi at the same time. when was the last time you had both of these happening ??

Lightey said:

Hello. I am extremely pissed off at Apple right now.
Their stupid iCloud service says that it backs up camera roll photos, but yet, I just restored my iPhone from my iCloud backup and I have NONE of my photos. These were important and I want them back. If someone could help, that would be great. This is typical Apple. "It just works" my ass.

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I've restored three different devices via iCloud backups in the last week and the photos restored fine.

When you open the camera roll do you seem some sort of text that says "downloading photos x/y" can't remember what it said but it said something like that. It takes time to download and the photos don't appear right away but you should see that text.

If you don't than you may want to check you 100% backed recently and that you restored from the right backup. In 98% of cases like this it is user error, I'm sorry to say.

If the photos were so important to you than you should have had local storage of then on a different device you own. I would never restore my personal phone until photos were safe on another device.

macingman said:

If the photos were so important to you than you should have had local storage of then on a different device you own. I would never restore my personal phone until photos were safe on another device.

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Very wise advice.

Lightey said:

Hello. I am extremely pissed off at Apple right now.
Their stupid iCloud service says that it backs up camera roll photos, but yet, I just restored my iPhone from my iCloud backup and I have NONE of my photos. These were important and I want them back. If someone could help, that would be great. This is typical Apple. "It just works" my ass.

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they can take a while to download along with all your app data. Just leave your iPhone plugged in and connected to wifi for a while.

Lightey said:

Hello. I am extremely pissed off at Apple right now.
Their stupid iCloud service says that it backs up camera roll photos, but yet, I just restored my iPhone from my iCloud backup and I have NONE of my photos. These were important and I want them back. If someone could help, that would be great. This is typical Apple. "It just works" my ass.

Click to expand...

When were they last backed up?

Yeah, iCloud backs up your photos. But if your device hasn't been backed up to iCloud in over a year, how can you expect to have anything recent?

Lightey said:

Hello. I am extremely pissed off at Apple right now.
Their stupid iCloud service says that it backs up camera roll photos, but yet, I just restored my iPhone from my iCloud backup and I have NONE of my photos. These were important and I want them back. If someone could help, that would be great. This is typical Apple. "It just works" my ass.

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Classic. Blaming Apple for something that could have been entirely avoided by some good practise by you - namely - backing up your very important photos yourself!

I rely on dropbox for my photo backups. They have done a really nice job with it. plug in the device, new photo's get transferred to the dropbox folder, which then uploads to dropbox. Local and off site backup without any mouse clicks, and no duplicates. I wish that Apple's solution were that well designed, but it's not.

Only thing worse than not backing up is expecting the cloud to function.

I believe there was an iCloud outage today... could be related to that.

Interstella5555 said:

Only thing worse than not backing up is expecting the cloud to function.

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Or writing a forum post about it YIKES

I would definitely suggest wiping it and restoring from the backup again. Make sure it's on wifi and plugged in and give it a few hours to think. I've sometimes had restores miss something and then, on a second try, they come through just fine.

Did you set up photo stream? It takes a while for the photos to show up even once the rest of your restore is done. Update us when you can.

decafjava said:

This might be a dumb question, but did you have the "photo stream" option turned on when you took them? Do you have any other ios device?

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tl01 said:

Did you set up photo stream? It takes a while for the photos to show up even once the rest of your restore is done. Update us when you can.

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No offense, but what does the Photostream option have to do with this at all?

I've had that option off for several months on my i5. But, in Settings, my photos are set to backup to iCloud (it's a toggle, Settings>iCloud>Strorage and Backup>Manage Storage>Backups>Your iPhone>Backup Options, Camera Roll (On)) and I've restored more than once with the Photostream option off and all my photos came back.

Photostream is just for sharing photos between devices. Maybe iCloud might back it up but it's not even on option on the iCloud backup list. Only Camera Roll is and iCloud will only back up photos if that option is enabled.

If the OP never enabled this and then restored, the OP is out of luck.

Last time I did a restore it took a very very long time for all my pictures to make there way back onto the phone. Its the only thing I back up, aside from a couple exercise logs and such.

Someone also mentioned that iCloud may have been down today. I wouldnt mess with it in fear of overwriting the backup.....

As others have mentioned, you should have backed it up locally.
In all honesty, I feel safer to back up my phone through my computer, where I have local access to it

eyoungren said:

No offense, but what does the Photostream option have to do with this at all?

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Photo Stream is a good backup system. Whenever your phone is on WiFi it uploads your photos to your stream without having to be plugged in like for backup. While the intended/initial purpose is device sharing, it's a backup system as well. In the OP's case or if the phone had been stolen, damaged beyond repair, etc, if photo stream was enabled, it would have had at least the last months worth of photos. A month of photos is better than nothing.

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darricksailo said:

As others have mentioned, you should have backed it up locally.
In all honesty, I feel safer to back up my phone through my computer, where I have local access to it

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Agreed. The easy (lazy) way is, to address the Photo Stream question at the same time, to setup your iPhoto or Aperture to sync the photo streams on your Mac. I just launch it every couple of weeks and let it sync the photo streams and photos from the camera roll are backed up. Aperture creates a new "project" by month so it's easy to sift through if I was looking for something from the snowstorm last month or a picnic last July.

Fair enough. While having it off or on has no bearing on the primary backup of the Camera Roll I can see it as a secondary backup.

Personally, if I have pictures I don't want to lose I tend to pull them off my phone right away. If it's that important, don't rely on just one single form of backup.