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iphone took a swim, want to sell, but I have "sensitive" photos on there

L

lolahere

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 12, 2009
10
0
Ok so please don't laugh at me, but basically I am a dumbass... ok go ahead and laugh :p


Anyway, I have an iphone 3g 16GB and so last night I went for a swim and needed to time myself so i had my phone sitting at the edge of the pool. I am very careful w/ it (have it in a hard case, skin covers the screen blah blah, well of course my dumb ass ends up knocking it into the pool the moment that I actually climb OUT of the pool. So yeah, it was in the water for a good 3 seconds or so. I dry it off right away and being the ditzy girl that I am I come home and attempt to try it on and off and get it to work over and over again... later on I come to find out you're not supposed to do any of this when you get electronics into water :(

at first I could still see everything on my screen. I clicked the calendar box and all of my stuff was still on there, contact list was there but the screen was just way darker, anyways I read on here to attempt to put some heat on it. So I take the sim card out and basically take my blow dryer to it and I also put it on top of my toaster oven for like 2 hours at low heat. At this point the apple logo keep appearing on the screen but I can no longer see all of the stuff on my screen, the apple logo appears and it goes away

towards the end of the night my fiance finds out what happened and he attempts to turn it on a few more times and I yell at him about it.

leave the phone there till morning and the fog has disappeared from the camera lens. i try to click on and nothing happens.

I am assuming that I short circuited it either by 1) the water itself or 2) trying to turn it on and off afterwards

I have taken good care of this phone and I can most likely get a new one because my dad loves his phone and has not upgraded, so I can basically just use his upgrade to buy the new iphone that's coming out... and I also saw that on ebay you can sell water damaged iphones for between $150-250

the ONLY thing that I am worried about is this... I am kind of a gym rat so starting about 2 months ago I started taking some naked pix of myself in the mirror just to check out my progress on certain areas of my body that I am working on. Nothing too racy but still I am naked in the pix, and on the rest of the photos there are regular pix of myself........ so i don't want to sell the phone if anyone will be ever able to pull up the pix. is this a possibility? how can i make sure that the pix are totally wiped out before I sell it?

ok you may all proceed to laugh now and call me a dumb ass

thanks!
 
o geesh....just keep it and consider it lesson learned - there will be a bazillion people on here that offer to buy it from you given your statement.....
 
Have you tried connecting it to iTunes at all? If, somehow, iTunes happens to connect to it, you could do a restore which will wipe everything that's stored on the phone.
 
The misus dropped her nokia in a mug of hot tea last week, ended up in there for about 30 seconds, I took off everything that could easily be removed, and then left in completely covered in a bowl of uncooked rice for 48 hours, phone woks fine now even though it wouldn't work coming out of the tea. So try that, otherwise I think if you can't turn it on you won't be able to remove the pics.
 
brvheart said:
o geesh....just keep it and consider it lesson learned - there will be a bazillion people on here that offer to buy it from you given your statement.....
Click to expand...

yeah :/ but I figured I had to be honest if I wanted a real answer

UPDATE: I just plugged it into Itunes and the pix are all coming up can i just delete everything and it will be gone? for real or is there any way they can be saved on there? HELP

thefunkymunky said:
No offence, but is the OP post for real - since they've just registered today?
Click to expand...

why else would I register? I have not had any problems before. What's specifically so strange about this? I am a girl, I took a few pix of myself, and I dropped my phone in the water. May make it funny... but I figure I am not the only person that this has happened to. Chillax
 
Try putting the phone in a bag of rice for a few days.

Be sure to put tape over the crevasses of the phone (headphone jack, connector etc).
 
ya you prolly would get more dinero. Try popppin that bad boy in a bag of rice for a while. I cant confirm it works, but Ive heard from more than one source that its the way to go. But if its broke, its broke. Better to have a porno paperweight than pics of your nude frame floatin around..
 
thefunkymunky said:
No offence, but is the OP post for real - since they've just registered today?
Click to expand...

What would be the point otherwise?

Either they read the forums/googled iphone help and have to register to post or they have absolutely nothing better to do and make up stories for a brief spurt :)P) of entertainment for the forum.
 
lolahere said:
yeah :/ but I figured I had to be honest if I wanted a real answer

UPDATE: I just plugged it into Itunes and the pix are all coming up can i just delete everything and it will be gone? for real or is there any way they can be saved on there? HELP
Click to expand...
If the iphone is showing up in itunes, just pull the pictures off the iPhone into iPhoto and then wipe the phone via iTunes.
 
My son's iphone took a swim also. Tried rice first but it did not work. Would start to power up, then die. After many surgery attempts and cleaning I was able to get it working just fine. Pool/chlorinated water is very bad on the iphone and causes corrosion pretty quickly.

- James
 
Ideally you should rinse the phone with distilled (de-ionised) water then dry it with dessicant in a sealed bag. But most people don't have those lying around or quick to hand.

Maybe I'll start selling iphone soaking restore packs on ebay so you can carry one with you just in case! ;)
 
lolahere said:
yeah :/ but I figured I had to be honest if I wanted a real answer

UPDATE: I just plugged it into Itunes and the pix are all coming up can i just delete everything and it will be gone? for real or is there any way they can be saved on there? HELP
Click to expand...

Just press "Download All" in Image Capture when it pops up (if you use a Mac) and it'll remove all the photos from your iPhone and put them on your computer (just make sure under "Options" you have "delete items from camera after download" checked). If you use Windows then I'm not sure what you have to do, unfortunately.

I would not mention the fact that you had any sort of sensitive photos on there when you sell it. I'm not sure why you would mention it, but there are ways to retrieve photos from the flash memory even after they have been deleted so some pioneering soul could potentially goto great lengths to try to find them if he/she knew that they were there.
 
^ Yes to that.


AlfaLavala said:
Do a restore and that'll clear everything, presumably you want to clear contacts and messages as well if you're selling it?
Click to expand...

and yes to this.


Lola, you can do a restore through iTunes and it will clear the phone's data.

Putting it in with some uncooked rice is a good idea if you don't have any desiccants handy.
 
You still have hope. I've seen messed up toliet watered iPhone comes back to life!. Take it apart, take the battery out, clean with distilled water, dry it well. Then you might have chance to save it and working 100% again. Good luck.
 
Does anyone want to explain to her that with certain software, even if you delete the pics on the phone, they are recoverable? I wish I could find the article that explains it.
 
lolahere said:
the ONLY thing that I am worried about is this... I am kind of a gym rat so starting about 2 months ago I started taking some naked pix of myself in the mirror just to check out my progress on certain areas of my body that I am working on.
Click to expand...

Put this in the eBay ad and get lots of money.
 
lolahere said:
UPDATE: I just plugged it into Itunes and the pix are all coming up can i just delete everything and it will be gone? for real or is there any way they can be saved on there? HELP
Click to expand...

Pics or it didn't happen. Just kidding. ;)

You said you plugged into the computer, which program are you referring to that's viewing the pics, iTunes or something else like Windows Scanners/Cameras wizard?

If it's something else, for example - Windows Scanners + cameras wizard has the option to clear the phone once you import. Try that, and then plug it back in again to verify the pics have been cleared.


You can also try a restore (that will definitely clear it, because it loads the whole OS again) but if you're having issues with the phone turning on, a restore may not take all the way and you could end up with a paperweight you can't sell.
 
I would say suck it up and take a hammer to it. Having the possibility of revealing info out there in the wild is not worth the money you would get.

Now of course the greedy person in me says how much could this get? You could post this same story on ebay with the phone and probably get a million bids from all the preverts. Could bring in some cash? :)

troutspinner
 
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