Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iPhone 4 Photo Library Eternally Updating!

T

TheConfuzed1

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 4, 2003
925
0
I'm at my wits end here.

This whole mess began when my wife emailed me several videos of our kids that she took with her iPhone 4.

I saved each of them to my photo roll. There must have been five or six.

When I clicked on either photos or camera from that point I got a message that my library was updating, and a progress bar.

The progress bar would reach the end, and the phone would crash to the springboard.

I tried rebooting, and even restored factory settings, to no avail.

I restored the phone, and checked the photo and camera apps, and at this point, they were both working.

I restored from backup, hoping that it would work.

This time, when the phone was syncing, I got an error 13010.

I Googled and discovered this error to be a corrupted genius file, so I deleted my genius file and tried again. This time it synced without a hitch.

I clicked on the camera, and it seemed to be working. From the camera app, I could see one of the videos was the most recent item in the photo roll.

I clicked on the photo roll, and there it was... "Updating Library," but no progress bar this time.

I clicked on photos and got the same thing. I then clicked back over to camera, and discovered the same message again, without the need to click on the camera roll, before running the message. My camera was once again unusable.

So I figured maybe I just need to give it some time, so I left my phone plugged into the charger, and this message on the screen, over night, with auto-lock disabled.

I woke up this morning to find it exactly how I left it.

This is the first time I have ever encountered an iPhone problem that I was unable to get myself out of.

I really don't want to lose my app data, texts, etc.

Please someone tell me they know how to fix this!

I am running iOS 4.1, and the latest iTunes, in a Power Mac, with the latest edition of Leopard.

I will be forever grateful if you can help!
 
Another solution that I would happily welcome would be a way to kill the photo library on my iPhone without having to open the photos or camera app.

I have backups of all of my photos, so that would be just fine.

I just don't know if there is a way to do that.

Does anyone know? Anyone? Bueler?
 
I would say do a restore and setup as new.
Dont restore from backup cause sounds like your backup file is buggy.
Then transfer all your stuff back thru itunes like pics, music, apps etc....
 
This literally just happened to me this weekend. There are tons of complaints about this online. It has to do with corrupted photos getting into the photo roll, or photos already in the roll becoming corrupted. It seems particularly common when you save items from Safari or Mail into the photo roll. Restoring from Backup won't work, because your backup also has the corrupted file in the Camera Roll.

It seems most people can break out of this by simply deleting the new photos that were added to the Camera Roll. Since you can't actually get there on the phone, it could be tough. If you're jailbroken you can use iFile or iPhone Explorer. If not, you could try the Touch Copy demo.

Ultimately, you need to delete this corrupted file from the library and photo data directories:
/User/Media/DCIM/100Apple/ or /User/Media/DCIM/999Apple/

and its corresponding photo data in:
/User/Media/PhotoData/100Apple/ or /User/Media/PhotoData/999Apple/

So if I were you, I'd delete those new files you saved, and the thumbnails stored in the Photo Data folder. Hopefully that works for you.

I was not quite as lucky. I couldn't find the offending file, so I had to wipe out my entire Camera Roll. I copied the photos out using iPhone Explorer ahead of time, so I didn't lose anything, but it was a pain.

As a note, don't go crazy here. There are important files down in these directories. Only delete files with extensions .jpg, .bth, and .thm.
 
Thank you so much for your answer Gimzotoy.

I have my pics backed up, so I would happily zap my photo library to make my camera functional again.

I was jailbroken, but since I am now on 4.1, I am no longer.

I think I'll just put up with it for now, and try that as soon as a jailbreak is released. Hopefully it won't be long.

Thanks again!
 
Sounds like a plan. It seems like the 4.1 jailbreak isn't too far off into the distance, what with videos of it working being posted up by the dev teams. Note that any app that saves files to the camera roll will behave oddly. Camera+ just pretends to save and removes your file from the lightbox like it was successful, but doesn't actually save it anywhere (resulting in image loss). Hipstamatic crashes. I'm sure there is other strange behavior on a per-app basis.

If you can't wait, Touch Copy should work for you. It's limited to copying 100 files off the device in demo mode, but if you have everything backed up already all you need to do is delete, which I believe is unlimited.

Good luck!
 
Good info bro.
Thanks.

Gimzotoy said:
This literally just happened to me this weekend. There are tons of complaints about this online. It has to do with corrupted photos getting into the photo roll, or photos already in the roll becoming corrupted. It seems particularly common when you save items from Safari or Mail into the photo roll. Restoring from Backup won't work, because your backup also has the corrupted file in the Camera Roll.

It seems most people can break out of this by simply deleting the new photos that were added to the Camera Roll. Since you can't actually get there on the phone, it could be tough. If you're jailbroken you can use iFile or iPhone Explorer. If not, you could try the Touch Copy demo.

Ultimately, you need to delete this corrupted file from the library and photo data directories:
/User/Media/DCIM/100Apple/ or /User/Media/DCIM/999Apple/

and its corresponding photo data in:
/User/Media/PhotoData/100Apple/ or /User/Media/PhotoData/999Apple/

So if I were you, I'd delete those new files you saved, and the thumbnails stored in the Photo Data folder. Hopefully that works for you.

I was not quite as lucky. I couldn't find the offending file, so I had to wipe out my entire Camera Roll. I copied the photos out using iPhone Explorer ahead of time, so I didn't lose anything, but it was a pain.

As a note, don't go crazy here. There are important files down in these directories. Only delete files with extensions .jpg, .bth, and .thm.
Click to expand...
 
Actually, since I had Cydia store my SHSH blobs on 4.0, I should probably be able to downgrade, jailbreak, fix my camera roll, and update to 4.1 again.

Wow. That's a lot of work. Maybe I'll try that when I have a few hours to kill.
 
TheConfuzed1 said:
Actually, since I had Cydia store my SHSH blobs on 4.0, I should probably be able to downgrade, jailbreak, fix my camera roll, and update to 4.1 again.

Wow. That's a lot of work. Maybe I'll try that when I have a few hours to kill.
Click to expand...

Just download Touch Copy. Delete files. Done. No jailbreak necessary.

It's demoware, so it'll be limited to 15 days and 100 file copies, but you shouldn't encounter either of those restrictions.
 
Here's an update:

Touch Copy made my Powerbook freeze, every time I tried to use it.

However, I was able to use iPhone Explorer to fix the problem!

Thank you Gizmo for the advice!

Now I have another problem though...

Whenever I plug my iPhone into my computer, iTunes crashes.

I have no idea what would cause this.

Are there any other files I can delete to fix that?

If I don't know what it is, I'm not touching it!

My new problem is posted here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back