lost all pics iphone 5

[adam4449]

Hello. I was trying to sync my pics/videos from iphone to imac. i got this message asking me if it's a new iphone or backup from last date ( it was not my first time using this iphone with my mac ) i picked on backup. after my iphone restarted didn't find any of my pics videos but some of the pics were on photo stream because I use I cloud. what happened to all the videos and the pics. the strange thing is that all the pics that i found from icloud are old and new but too many are missing and no videos. i just updated my iphone 5 a few days ago. Also my notes didn't all come back.

please help.
best regards

 

[chickenwingfly]

Hopefully somebody knows the answer to this, but in the meantime, if I was you, I'd try to see if I can recover anything at all, from the backup files (assuming you have not just one lying around, or that there was a bug that prevented iTunes form copying all data).

You go to

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Then you copy all directories in there to a folder {TEMPORARY_LOCATION}. Notice if you have more than one iDevice there will be folders for backups of other devices in there as well, so you'll have to skip them later on.

Then you open terminal, switch to the temporary location

cd {TEMPORARY_LOCATION}

And you rename all files in there to JPG (repeat the same for movies with MP4). You could I guess remove files bigger than 10 Mb before this so you'd make sure you're only trying to recover pictures. Likewise (but backwards so to speak) with movies, where you'd try and reproduce the biggest files in there with VLC or something like that.

find . -type f | while read file ; do mv $file $file.jpg; done

Once all files renamed to JPG then try and preview them and if you find any of them to be a real picture just save it (copy or move) somewhere else. It will take some time, yes.