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iPhone 11 Pro Photos in iMessage missing?

TonyC17

TonyC17

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 22, 2016
64
57
Hey everyone,

Reaching out to users who recently received a new iPhone during launch weekend! So far my iPhone 11 Pro Max is working great and everything transferred over from my XS Max just fine. The only thing I am missing are the pictures in all my texts. I know it sounds crazy but I easily have thousands of pictures in there and I'm trying to get them back. I still have my XS Max but need to return it soon because I am in the iPhone Upgrade Program.

I called Apple yesterday for help and was told there were "aware" of this issue. Interesting and curious to find out if anyone else has this problem.

Thanks for the help!
 
I have a similar issue, but all of the photos from my iMessages are in the message threads, but they don't show up in the "info" section the way they used to. It's never been a problem before, but has really been an issue for me this time. I'm like you, I've got 27GB worth of iMessages, and my thread with my wife probably dates back to 2013 with pictures, videos etc. that I still technically "have", but would love to have in one place.
 
WilliamG said:
Was coming here to see if anyone else had this issue. All I have is pictures since Friday taken on my new phone.
Click to expand...
I still have all of my photos. Only ones missing are ones from my messages. Believe it or not I have over 70GBs of memory used up in my iMessage (Yikes).
 
With iOS 13.1 releasing in the last 30 minutes or so, I found this in the "Bug Fixes and other improvements" tab:

- "Fixes an issue where photos might not display in the Messages details view"

I will install when I leave the office and let everyone know!
 
I am downloading 13.1 as we speak I type, and noticed that same bug fix in the description. Hoping it works! Will report back here when it's done.
 
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Downloaded 13.1 and restarted the phone about an hour ago. Nothing populated immediately, so after about 30 minutes (no changes at all, even in threads with minimal photos) I toggled iMessages off and then on again in my iCloud settings. It now says "downloading messages from iCloud" in my iMessage app. It's said that a few times as I've tried to troubleshoot this issue, so I don't have high hopes.

If anyone is able to figure this out, let me know...
 
I'm also having this issue. Didn't resolve with iOs 13.1, and neither did it with toggling Messages in iCloud off and then back on.

Has anyone found a way of fixing it?
 
crdav said:
I'm also having this issue. Didn't resolve with iOs 13.1, and neither did it with toggling Messages in iCloud off and then back on.

Has anyone found a way of fixing it?
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat. I went through a couple of threads and saved a good number of photos to my camera roll. I guess that will have to do for now.
 
Didn't work for me either. Still have my old phone but have to return it soon...
 
This is a known problem, we discussed it on the iOS 13 forum. 13.1 fixes the issue for most people. The other catch is to plug your phone up to power and let it sit for 30 mins or so and the photos should all reappear. I was missing 20 gigs of pictures in messages. All good now. We suspect it’s a reindexing issue that was broken in 13.
 
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Having this same issue. I've tried to restore my phone 3 times now with no luck. Its currently being restored again as i type this. When i go into a message thread after its freshly restored i can see in the info screen where it will say 356 pictures in icloud with a download button under that but pressing that button does not seem to do anything. I dont see any indexing signs either. Just a "Downloading messages from icloud" notification at the bottom when i open up messages. Super frustrating. Updated to 13.1 but still continuing to have this issue. Anyone have a fix for this??
 
Flash69 said:
This is a known problem, we discussed it on the iOS 13 forum. 13.1 fixes the issue for most people. The other catch is to plug your phone up to power and let it sit for 30 mins or so and the photos should all reappear. I was missing 20 gigs of pictures in messages. All good now. We suspect it’s a reindexing issue that was broken in 13.
Click to expand...
Do you have a link to that thread? Downloaded 13.1 yesterday and still not resolved. Thanks in advance!
 
I had the same issue when I restored from my iCloud backup. My keychain passwords didn’t come across either.
I erased the phone, tried again and finally it worked. Did take some time to index my iMessages as I have 40 gigs of messages and photos.
 
sydia21 said:
I had the same issue when I restored from my iCloud backup. My keychain passwords didn’t come across either.
I erased the phone, tried again and finally it worked. Did take some time to index my iMessages as I have 40 gigs of messages and photos.
Click to expand...

Did you create a new backup, erase and reinstall your updated backup? At this point I've had my new phone almost a week and there are pics and texts that I don't want to lose. If I'd have to go back to my old backup, I'd probably just deal with the annoyance.
 
In case anyone hasn't figured it out by now, iMessage was never intended to be an archival storage location for gigabytes of photos.
The classic phrase "you're using it wrong" is very applicable here.
 
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Bigserver1 said:
Did you create a new backup, erase and reinstall your updated backup? At this point I've had my new phone almost a week and there are pics and texts that I don't want to lose. If I'd have to go back to my old backup, I'd probably just deal with the annoyance.
Click to expand...
I think a new backup from my 11 was created and when i erased it, but I chose to back up from the one I had used the first time I set up then the phone- the last backup from my Xs. Apparently iCloud merged both my backups because all the info on my new phone since my last backup. was part of the backup.

So I wiped my 11, manually restored from my last Xs backup and everything was there when my iMessages finally finished indexing.
 
Same issue here. 13.1.1 didn’t fix it. Hoping there’s another fix at some point because I’m not confident my XS backup will restore them.
 
now i see it said:
In case anyone hasn't figured it out by now, iMessage was never intended to be an archival storage location for gigabytes of photos.
The classic phrase "you're using it wrong" is very applicable here.
Click to expand...
It accepts them, stores them in lCloud, and has options to keep "forever". So it should work.
 
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I restored my phone yesterday from my last backup on my XS from 9/20 and for some reason my recents texts from the past week were in there. Strange but still no pictures. I’ll probably go to the Apple Store tomorrow and hopefully get this resolved
 
I was having the same issue but after rebooting and leaving it on the charger overnight they started to come through and seem to all be there now.
 
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