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Two days of photos from the most important day of my life - missing

N

needphotosback

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 21, 2012
7
0
My wife gave birth the other night to two beautiful twin girls. All are happy and healthy and I'm over the moon.

I have an iPhone 4S, and all the photos I took of their birth, their first day of life, and their second day are missing. Gone. My camera roll goes from the day before they were born to today.

I've researched and tried rebooting my phone, quitting and reopening the photos app and camera app, but nothing works. What's more, my entire Camera+ photo library is completely missing as well (there are photos in here that were separate from the 2 days worth of photos I'm missing in the camera roll), and there were tons of new baby photos in there too.

I'm afraid of restoring... what if that permanently wipes the photos?

I've been able to salvage some of the photos since I've messaged a few out, but I want them all back.

please help guys.

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edit:

lots of people are asking the same questions, here's more info. thank you all:

I do use photostream, but the photos aren't there. I don't back my photos up to iCloud because then I would surpass the 5 gig limit and have to pay (I'll start doing that from now on).

I've already plugged in my phone to my computer and the pictures still don't show up, and what worries me even more is that there's no gaps in the filenames. For example, the names go "img_1042, img_1043, img_1044" even though there are two days missing in between.

-------

second edit: resolved! the photos ended up being earlier in my photo library, months before where they should have been. thanks everyone for your help.
 
Last edited:
Well first, congrats to you and your wife! Awesome!!

Assuming you don't use Photostream and they're not tucked away in the cloud somewhere, I'd definitely back the phone up before attempting anything.

I use Windows and it always gives me the option to unload photos independently from iTunes when I plug in my iPhone. Hopefully others have suggestions, but if it were me, I'd tell iTunes not to auto-sync on connection, then plug my phone in and see if I can download pics. It's always possible that the photos are on the phone, but just not displaying in the camera roll for some reason. Good luck!
 
needphotosback said:
My wife gave birth the other night to two beautiful twin girls. All are happy and healthy and I'm over the moon.

I have an iPhone 4S, and all the photos I took of their birth, their first day of life, and their second day are missing. Gone. My camera roll goes from the day before they were born to today.

I've researched and tried rebooting my phone, quitting and reopening the photos app and camera app, but nothing works. What's more, my entire Camera+ photo library is completely missing as well (there are photos in here that were separate from the 2 days worth of photos I'm missing in the camera roll), and there were tons of new baby photos in there too.

I'm afraid of restoring... what if that permanently wipes the photos?

please help guys.
Click to expand...

Is it possible that the photos have been backed up to your iCloud account?
 
Why aren't you using photostream?

When you plug it into your PC can you see the pics in Explorer?

Restoring it will wipe out everything... :eek:
 
I have had this happen before, i took some pictures of this basically river going through our backyard during a heavy rain. The next day they were gone. about 2 weeks later they randomly showed up again.

I don't know of anything i did, i don't use photostream to back it up to icloud.

Not exactly sure what happened. :confused:

Best of luck trying to get the pictures back and congrats on the babies!!
 
Congrats..
The only way that you will be able to retrieve your photos is by restoring unfortunatly.. Lucky for you, When your phone backs up to iCloud, luckily it backs up individual apps (camera+ and the cameraroll, etc). The difference is, lets say you take a picture a month ago. If you go in and deleted it 2 weeks later. And then restored your phone today. It will restore all your photos including the one taken a month ago, because it backs up your data. Not sync your data if that makes since.. So theirs a chance that if your iPhone synced with iCloud during those times that you taken a photo that when you restore from a backup (even if its the latest one) that those photos will reappear..
 
Can you tell us what your set-up was around that time? Did you have iCloud back-up set up? Or were you using itunes to back-up your phone? How do you normally handle pic taken on your phone. Do you transfer them? etc...
 
thanks for the congrats guys, they're beautiful :)

I do use photostream, but the photos aren't there. I don't back my photos up to iCloud because then I would surpass the 5 gig limit and have to pay (I'll start doing that from now on).

I've already plugged in my phone to my computer and the pictures still don't show up, and what worries me even more is that there's no gaps in the filenames. For example, the names go "img_1042, img_1043, img_1044" even though there are two days missing in between.

any other suggestions guys?

thank you all for the help.
 
needphotosback said:
thanks for the congrats guys, they're beautiful :)

I do use photostream, but the photos aren't there. I don't back my photos up to iCloud because then I would surpass the 5 gig limit and have to pay (I'll start doing that from now on).

I've already plugged in my phone to my computer and the pictures still don't show up, and what worries me even more is that there's no gaps in the filenames. For example, the names go "img_1042, img_1043, img_1044" even though there are two days missing in between.

any other suggestions guys?

thank you all for the help.
Click to expand...

When was the last time you backed the phone up and was that after you took the pictures of your new additions?

Congrats BTW. :)
 
Firstly - Congrats :D

What I would be doing (certainly before restoring) is to jailbreak it, and then go snooping round the iPhones file structure looking in probable locations for the JPGs. They wont be easy to find, and its usually a real mess in there with no structure to the filenames etc, but it could be a corrupt library somehow. They could then be copied across to your computer and renamed accordingly.

Just my £0.02 :D
 
1. What version iOS are you running?
2. Did you message of post to facebook any of those pictures?
3. Did you look at the picture at any point after you took them? Were they there?
 
Did you use the build in camera app or a 3rd party camera app like Camera+ or something? Maybe they are in that apps roll. Also, if you don't have a dropbox account get one and install their app. Their app can offer to backup your camera roll. Do that then decide later which pics you really need to keep.
 
VSMacOne said:
1. What version iOS are you running?
2. Did you message of post to facebook any of those pictures?
3. Did you look at the picture at any point after you took them? Were they there?
Click to expand...

1. 5.1.1
2. I messaged a lot of them through imessage/sms app, but the majority of them are gone and I want everything back
3. yes I looked at the pictures, they were there, I messaged some out, and yesterday I looked and they were all gone.
 
Looks like the three suggestions I have are:

1) Wait in case they show up again.
2) Jailbreak and look through the phone files.
3) Restore.

I'm still confused as to how restoring will solve my problem, as my photos do not back up to iCloud.

Any other suggestions? What's the best move considering the three choices above?

Thanks everyone, let's hope we can get these photos back.
 
Have you rebooted yet?


needphotosback said:
Looks like the three suggestions I have are:

1) Wait in case they show up again.
2) Jailbreak and look through the phone files.
3) Restore.

I'm still confused as to how restoring will solve my problem, as my photos do not back up to iCloud.

Any other suggestions? What's the best move considering the three choices above?

Thanks everyone, let's hope we can get these photos back.
Click to expand...
 
Which app did you use when you took the photos, the regular Apple iPhone app, or Camera + or some other app. Some apps may store the photos shot using them in their own library. Is it possible that you used one of these and that is why they haven't appeared in the iPhoto library.

Also it sounds like you take a lot of photos. I've noticed lately that some of my photos are appearing in the iPhotos app out of sequence. By that I mean not with the other photos that were taken with it.

I saw in your original post that you said you researched, but I don't know what that means. You may want to do a careful search through all the photos looking for them. I would also say not to look for them as a batch but as if they were scattered among the other photos, which they may be.

I would assume that in your searching you looked for them by date. If not you could try this, again expecting to find them scattered throughout your photos because they were stored by some other criteria.

I hope this helps a little.

And as others have said congratulations to you and your wife.
 
I saw one other person ask about backups in iTunes but no response. If you plugged the phone into iTunes while the photos were there you would be able to restore to that backup to see if they reappear.
 
needphotosback said:
Yes, it says so in my original post, and people keep asking.
Click to expand...

After the reset look through your entire photo library. This happened to me once and the pictures were further up in my photo library, by photos I took a long time ago, where they should not have been. I don't know how this happened, but it did. Hope this helps!
 
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