Having Trouble Getting Photos to Sync in iMessage on iOS 26

[brezz]

The photos in my text threads on iOS 26 are really messed up. I have some threads where the pictures have all downloaded from iCloud, and others where I’m only seeing a fraction of the photos that are saved. And the problem is not consistent across devices. For the same text thread, different photos are available/visible on my MacBook Pro, iPad, and iPhone.

It gives me the option to “download attachments” but that hasn’t improved it, plus it gets stuck and is taking forever to download for each of my threads. I’ve tried to sign out of iMessage and also iCloud, but that hasn’t improved the syncing issue.

Is anyone else having these issues with iOS 26 messages? Should I just give it more time to see if it needs to index? Or is this a bug that I have to hope gets fixed in the next update?

 

[jha]

Long standing issue

 

[Maxell]

I have the same problem. iMessage was working fine in iOS 18.7 but iOS 26 messed up photos as you describe. However, we are not alone. Here’s a thread with almost 400 other people taking the time to comment. Imagine how many others there are that have not commented. Hope Apple fixes this soon. I’m on iPhone 15 pro iOS 26.0.1

Missing photos in iMessage after iOS 26 u… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[Maxell]

The photos in my text threads on iOS 26 are really messed up. I have some threads where the pictures have all downloaded from iCloud, and others where I’m only seeing a fraction of the photos that are saved. And the problem is not consistent across devices. For the same text thread, different photos are available/visible on my MacBook Pro, iPad, and iPhone.

It gives me the option to “download attachments” but that hasn’t improved it, plus it gets stuck and is taking forever to download for each of my threads. I’ve tried to sign out of iMessage and also iCloud, but that hasn’t improved the syncing issue.

Is anyone else having these issues with iOS 26 messages? Should I just give it more time to see if it needs to index? Or is this a bug that I have to hope gets fixed in the next update?

It’s a bug. Nothing helps. Wait for Apple to fix it

 

[Rorosbutt]

Picked up my phone on lawn day and I have yet to get my Photos tapped back. For the few conversations where I do have the photos tab I have maybe two pictures out of the hundreds of thousands

 

[Maxell]

Picked up my phone on lawn day and I have yet to get my Photos tapped back. For the few conversations where I do have the photos tab I have maybe two pictures out of the hundreds of thousands

Yup. It’s a bug and it’s still not fixed in iOS 26.1 b3. Use the work around for now which is go to messages then enter the contact name followed by photos and it will show them this way. But they do not show in the iMessage gallery. For example enter “John Smith photos” and the scroll down past the links and you’ll see all the photos from that text thread

 

[brezz]

I'll be curious to see if this is fixed or not in 26.1 released today. I'm not optimistic though.

What sucks is that the work around searching by "name Photos" is only working on my iPad and not my iPhone. There are still a ton of missing photos there. Hoping that when I update it triggers the indexing again.

 

[Maxell]

I'll be curious to see if this is fixed or not in 26.1 released today. I'm not optimistic though.

What sucks is that the work around searching by "name Photos" is only working on my iPad and not my iPhone. There are still a ton of missing photos there. Hoping that when I update it triggers the indexing again.

It’s not fixed. I have installed 26.1 an hour ago when it was released. One the first things I checked was improvements in iMessage and the photo galley /Info sections. There’s still no fix. So annoying!

 

[Maxell]

I'll be curious to see if this is fixed or not in 26.1 released today. I'm not optimistic though.

What sucks is that the work around searching by "name Photos" is only working on my iPad and not my iPhone. There are still a ton of missing photos there. Hoping that when I update it triggers the indexing again.

The work around isn’t solid either. It doesn’t show any of the photos I send a contact and the ones it doesn’t show are not all of them.

 

[brezz]

Yeah I agree, on my iPad I can use the workaround and find pretty much what I'm looking for but it never indexed/loaded all the photos on the iPhone. I guess I'm not surprised it's not fixed, since it seems like this bug has been around for a few years. Sucks that I just picked it up when I upgraded to iOS 26.