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Really crazy camera issue

B

BrettDS

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 14, 2012
1,489
635
Orlando
OK, so my wife's iPhone 5S was part of the iOS 8 beta program and she had iCloud photo library enabled. She had more than 10,000 photos in her photo library (about 10,700, I believe). For some reason, her iPhone lost the ability to take and save pictures. She noticed that she can take pictures with the camera or even take a screen shot and everything appears normal, but the photos never appear in 'recently taken' or in the photos tab. If you take a picture the picture appears in the little preview window in the bottom right of the camera screen, but if you try to click on it to open it then the camera app hangs and needs to be force closed. We're not totally sure when it happened, because like I said, it appeared that everything was working and it wasn't until she tried to text a picture that she recently took that she realized that the photos weren't actually saving. (She wasn't out of memory.. it's a 64G phone and she had more than 13G free)

The last photos that were successfully saved were from 9/7, so that was while she was on iOS 8 beta 5. I'm not sure if the problem happened while she was on beta or during the upgrade to GM. (The upgrade to GM was done by restoring the phones in iTunes, then restoring an iCloud backup).

We discovered this a couple of days ago and weren't too worried about it because she was getting an iPhone 6 today and I figured that would probably resolve the issue. However, when we restored her latest backup to the iPhone 6 the problem came with it and now she can't take any new photos with the iPhone 6.

I decided to use the iPhone 5S to play around and see if I could figure out what happened and try to resolve the problem so I could then fix it on her iPhone 6. The first thing I tried to to was disable icloud photo library. That didn't make a difference. Then I reset all settings. Still broken. I then deleted every single picture and video left on her phone (in Windows I opened the device and went into the DCIM folder and deleted all of the pictures). I verified on the phone that there were no pictures left and tried to take a new picture.... same problem. I also noticed that even though the phone and the computer saw no pictures on the phone, the usage report showed Photos & Camera as taking up nearly 500M, so clearly there was still something left.

I decided to take another backup of the phone, but this time I turned off "photos" in the backup settings. I figured I'd erase content and settings, then restore the backup without the "photos" data. Once the backup completed I erased all content and settings in preparation for restoring the backup. Before I did that, though, I figured I'd set it up as a new iPhone and just verify that things were working properly after the wipe. Amazingly, when I tested it after setting it up as a new iPhone, the problem still existed.

At this point I put it in DFU mode and let iTunes re-download and reinstall iOS 8. I set it up as a new iPhone again and tested again and it finally worked. I could take pictures and save them.

So, now I erased all content and settings again and I'm attempting to restore the backup that I made earlier with photos turned off. I'm not sure I have too much faith of that working, but I should know shortly how it goes.

So, all that said, do you guys have any thoughts here about what might be going on or how I can get her data restored without breaking her camera in the process? She has saved iMessages going all the way back to 2009 and data in other apps that's pretty critical for her. While starting from scratch might be the best option, it would be a pretty tough pill for her to swallow, so I'm really hoping to avoid that.

Thanks much,
Brett

Edited to add that her iPad Mini Retina was also part of the iOS 8 beta program and also has iCloud photo library enabled pointing to the same photos. The iPad does not have this same issue, so I don't believe it's related to iCloud Photo Library.
 
Just a quick update that at this point it's looking like restoring the backup that was taken with 'photos' turned off may have worked. It's finished the first part of the restore and restarted and started downloading apps and such and at this point I am able to take pictures and they do get saved. My wife tried to take a picture with her iPhone 6 at about this point when it was restoring earlier today and it failed, so I do have some hope. One thing that is very odd is that even though I had photos turned off during the backup, it's still restoring some photos, so I'm not sure what's up with that. The only thing I can think is that it's pulling them from an older backup or something.

I think at this point I'll take a fresh backup of her iPhone 6 with photos turned off (this will be the first backup of the iPhone 6 as well, so it shouldn't be able to pull any photos from an old backup or anything), then I'll DFU restore the iPhone 6, verify that it can take pictures again, then restore the backup I just took. With any luck that will resolve the issue.
 
Just another quick update for anyone who cares or has this same issue later on. I had to take a break to sleep, but this morning I took the backup of the iPhone 6 with photos turned off, DFU'ed it, and then restored the backup. The backup is still reinstalling apps, but at this point the phone is still able to take pictures, so I'm feeling pretty hopeful. The iPhone 5S also finished it's restore overnight and is still able to take pictures too.

I also went ahead and re-enabled iCloud Photo Library on the iPhone 5S and while it's still downloading the thumbnails at this point, it is still able to take pictures even with IPL enabled. Assuming that the 5S is good when the sync completes, then I'll re-enable IPL on the 6 and see how that goes. I think the last step will be to attempt to switch the 5S (and subsequently the 6, if it works on the 5S) to "Download and save originals", rather than "optimize device space" as that was how it was originally configured. One difference between her iPad and her iPhone was that the iPad (which has been working all along) was configured to "optimize device space" and the phone (which had more memory) was configured to "Download and save originals".
 
This happened to me today! I took pictures separately of both my kids doing something, everything seemed normal, then when I went to look at the pictures, only my sons photos were there! The ones of my daughter did not exist!! What the....???
 
Hmm, that's really odd and hopefully not the same problem that I'm having as so far it's proven to be quite difficult to fix. A couple questions for you though... Do you have iCloud Photo Library turned on? If so, do you have it set to optimize device space or download and keep originals? Finally, are you still unable to take new pictures? If you try to take a new picture does it just not appear in your photos?
 
It seems right now it just happened that one time. Hopefully! iCloud and Photo library is on, the other stuff I'm not sure about... fingers crossed it was nothing but a weird glitch.
 
Hopefully one last follow up on this. Icloud photo library finished syncing on the 5s and then I enabled the option to download and save originals and still had no issues. I did the same on the 6 and it too is working properly. I still have no idea what caused the problem, so it worries me that it may return, but for the moment life is good.
 
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