New iPhone - Restore iMessage in iCloud Pictures

[fishcharlie]

I recently got a new iPhone, and restored from my iCloud Backup. I have iMessage in iCloud enabled, and overnight all my conversations were synced down to my new device. However, I just realized that media content (pictures, video, audio, etc) did not sync over. It just shows an empty chat bubble in place of the media content.

How can I restore the media content in iMessages to my new device?

 

[fishcharlie]

I realized that in iCloud it was showing that Messages was only taking up roughly 1GB of storage (which seemed incredibly low). On my iPad (which had all the data), I toggled the Messages toggle off then on under the iCloud sync settings. The next morning this caused the iCloud Messages storage to increase to about 6GB. Which seemed like an improvement, but still lower than I expected (considering that local storage was like 20GB for messages). This also lead to some images showing as "Download Image" (I forget the exact text) buttons in the conversation instead of empty chat bubbles, and tapping that downloaded and displayed the image. However some images were still empty chat bubbles.



Today, I erased the new phone, and set it up using the Direct Transfer function instead of iCloud Backup Restore. The local storage for iMessages now shows at roughly 20GB (which is expected), and after a few tests, it seems like images are showing up. Sadly I can't completely verify that the images I knew weren't syncing are there until the iMessage Search function finishes indexing my messages. I will try to report back after this is done to let everyone know if this worked.



It seems like this is some issue with really poor iCloud syncing behavior. Not sure why, but really seems like another Apple bug... 🙁

 

[stylinexpat]

I have a same similar problem now. On many of the contacts the images don’t show. Usually when you click at the top by the name/info you can see photos but mine isn’t available on many but some yes🤔 although when you scroll through the iMessages content some pictures do show up 🤔 The weird thing though is with this new update it seems like they are forcing people not to use iTunes sync function and update to the cloud instead. What ever happened to options? 🤔🤪 Apparently one has to turn on iCloud if I am not mistaken but if you turn on iCloud then it removes all your previously synced images with your own computer WTF?🤔🤪 Can someone help out?

 

[zea]

Yeah, same thing happened to me. I did a direct phone transfer and after a week or so, almost all my attachments/photos are just blank message bubbles. I have an old MacBook that has everything synced to it, and I can verify parts on the MacBook that has a picture someone sent me, versus my phone which is just a blank chat bubble. This is a big issue.

Does anyone know if I turn off iMessage in the Cloud on my MacBook, and then turn it back on, if it'll force all the photos/attachments to sync back up in the proper place?