I have seen throughout the years that my early photos have started disappearing and it has gotten to such a point that I know I had a photo of something, but I look back and it’s gone (I also see blacked-out corrupted photos) but not only is it gone, other photos are obviously gone. The idea that the first 2 years I had an iPhone are left with only 40 pictures left is insane. I had hundreds. Apple has been terrible with the photos app in the past. It took them around 5 years to fix the bug on the iPad that kept you from zooming in, rotating to another orientation and back, and resuming full screen without stalling and having to restart the photos app. The fact that they were that negligent about that bug for so many years is indicative of how they treated the photos app. It’s most likely that when there was very little free space they started corrupting the photo data or pushing it out without prioritizing it’s importance, and this has been going on for years. An app can be redownloaded (usually) a 10 year old photo can’t. Maybe Kodak should start a photo-backup cloud for iPhone users.
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iOS Progressively Deletes Or Corrupts Photos Over Time, Eliminating Them From Library, Or Corrupting The Files.
- Thread starter Simoleon547
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That’s very concerning! I’m not doubting anything that you said. For myself, I often offloaded my early photos because it was pre iCloud and storage was small. Just asking, is there any chance your early photos are on a hard drive somewhere?
Very interesting. I have not seen this, and I have several images on my current 14PM that I took with my 6 Plus that I took in April, 2015.
I also use a Lightning USB drive to back up my photos when I don't have cell service and don't want anything to happen to my phone and lose all my photos before they are synched with the cloud.
I also use a Lightning USB drive to back up my photos when I don't have cell service and don't want anything to happen to my phone and lose all my photos before they are synched with the cloud.
No I’m not synchronizing it or using icloud photo library. I doubt it would happen if I were because I think it relates to when there’s no more storage space. The photos that have been missing are from 2010-2012 and I have no idea when they disappeared. It could have been years ago. Normally SSD storage has an extra storage space that isn’t used but exists for when memory cells die from overuse. But I think that would be strange for it to be depleted. I know using an iPhone with virtually no storage space thrashes the same part of the SSD and can cause it to fail sooner but I would think that would take much longer than I had any of my phones at nearly full storage. It could have been an issue with older iOS versions. But the photos are just gone. I’ve known about it for a year or 2 and assumed it was happening when the memory was full. A big clue to it is that on my iPad some photos or videos (can’t tell what they were) are just black thumbnails.
+1. I’ve been having this happen for a couple of years now. I end up with so many black thumbnails near the beginning of my camera roll. The worst is not knowing which ones they are! Thankfully, I’ve been backing up photos elsewhere, too…
Are you sure you aren't using iCloud Photos to manage backups of your photos ... I'm pretty sure there's a setting to offload photos to the cloud periodically in the background to save space on your device. Perhaps in that case older photos might default to not being immediately accessible until you try to access them... at which point they might start to download? I dunno.
If not, this is clearly highly atypical behavior, or caused by some other activity on the part of the user. Otherwise, it'd be front page news, constantly.
I currently have 22,623 images on my phone going back to 2003 (the pre-iPhone photos were synced to my phone early on). That number has never gone down. I never have issues reviewing images ... searches will frequently take me back to those older years, etc.
I've never once had an issue of any photos just disappearing or becoming inaccessible. Same for my wife and kids (trust me, I'd hear about it) nor any of my extended family members for whom I'm the de facto tech support.
In fact, I don't think I've ever heard of this happening until coming across this thread.
Hope you figure it out. :-/
If not, this is clearly highly atypical behavior, or caused by some other activity on the part of the user. Otherwise, it'd be front page news, constantly.
I currently have 22,623 images on my phone going back to 2003 (the pre-iPhone photos were synced to my phone early on). That number has never gone down. I never have issues reviewing images ... searches will frequently take me back to those older years, etc.
I've never once had an issue of any photos just disappearing or becoming inaccessible. Same for my wife and kids (trust me, I'd hear about it) nor any of my extended family members for whom I'm the de facto tech support.
In fact, I don't think I've ever heard of this happening until coming across this thread.
Hope you figure it out. :-/
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Perhaps also consider which, if any, third-party apps have access to your photos. I’m not suggesting/assuming anything intentionally nefarious rather maybe mishandling somewhere else.
I'm pretty sure this is due to some third party app messing with your pictures because of some bug. I use iCloud Photos for everything, and I have 65000 pictures and 1500 videos on my account, back from 2014. Never lost a single file (and still, I do back them up religiously to my NAS and then to a second cloud).
Odd. I have 20,550 photos and videos going back to my first iPhone in 2008, and tons of pre-2008 photos and videos from other cameras. Nothing missing. I sync with iCloud Photos (2TB plan) and my Mac mini pulls originals, which are then backed up offsite (Backblaze) plus on-site to a Synology NAS as well as monthly archive backups to external drives.
I'm sorry to hear that you're losing photos - I'm paranoid about that, which is why I maintain multiple backups at home and remotely (iCloud, Mac mini, NAS, Backblaze, monthly local archives - so four complete backups at all times plus one backup updated monthly) . Maybe you should think about investing in a similar backup solution so that you don't lose anything else.
I'm sorry to hear that you're losing photos - I'm paranoid about that, which is why I maintain multiple backups at home and remotely (iCloud, Mac mini, NAS, Backblaze, monthly local archives - so four complete backups at all times plus one backup updated monthly) . Maybe you should think about investing in a similar backup solution so that you don't lose anything else.
Update: Good News with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 Recovering Photos
Sorry to bring back a dead thread, but there’s some good news that might be helpful to people who might have had similar issues happen at some point, whether they noticed it or not, and find this looking for an answer.After updating to iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, I opened the updated Photos app for the first time and got a message saying there were X amount of recovered photos not included in my library and asked me if I wanted to restore them. Sure enough there were a ton from my iPad library I didn’t know had been missing and a few I had noticed missing. I think the iPhone 15 Pro Max said it only found 1, but the iPad Pro M1 found over 2,500 photos and videos. I haven’t noticed any from the earliest times of 2011 or 2012 and the blacked out ones at the beginning might just not be able to register timestamps and effectively read 0/0/0, or whenever Apple was founded (which would be funny, funnier if it was the date the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head). I’ve had clearly bad timestamps before with screenshots that place them before even having a smartphone and knowing I’d taken them 10 years later. I expect the iPad had a lot that were recovered because I’d had an original iPad Pro and used it for 6 years before getting a new one (which I had to get because after a backup and erase in iTunes, iTunes said the backup couldn’t be restored for lack of storage space), offloaded a lot of iPhone photos to it, and the last few years I had it I’d maxed out the storage. Some photos or videos that were recovered are still blacked out but like 98% of them were fine.
Here’s the link provided by Apple to explain things. I don't care much how whichever of the problems they list happened, I’m just glad they introduced something that was very helpful. https://support.apple.com/en-us/120347?cid=mc-nav-photos-article_120347-ios_ui-06072024
Worth considering updating to iOS 18 for, even if someone has something they dislike about it. (I updated to the most recent version of iOS 17 before going to 18, just to be clear, and as Apple says, the recovered photos section is found in the Utilities section of the Photos app.)
IMPORTANT WARNING mentioned in that link: if you click Delete instead of Save/Recover, they will be permanently deleted immediately without going to the recently deleted section so choose wisely because it doesn’t clarify if they would come back after restoring from a backup (probably because they can’t confirm or guarantee it; I remember I used to do backup and restores a lot with iTunes and there was a lot of “Other” data that would disappear after and I used to think it was garbage files not dealt with, but now I’m thinking it could have been photos/videos fitting Apple’s description.)
A word of advice: screenshot or look through the photos at least before saving and recovering them to the library. I didn’t look through them all and now I feel like Neville Longbottom in the first Harry Potter movie with a glass-sphered device called a “Rememberall” with smoke inside that turns red when he’s forgotten something and he says “the trouble is, I can’t remember what I’ve forgotten”. And now I don’t remember what photos I or iOS didn’t remember that I got back without going through the entire library. Would have been useful to see the timestamps of when it was a problem to find out the cause of it too.
If anyone from Apple happens to see this comment: THANK YOU!
I do wish Apple would allow an option for even an erroneous display of photos that are too corrupted to render though and if Apple has to show a message on them disclaiming that the file is corrupted and this is the best JPEG/HEIF/H.264/H.265/H.266 depiction that can be displayed I’m perfectly happy to put up with it. Sometimes that would be just enough to preserve a memory. Or edit it to eliminate the corrupted or missing data.
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Good to know.
Basically, it seems like you’re saying Apple refined the activity associated with iOS 17.5 by adding information dialog boxes.
Apple Sheds More Light on iOS 17.5 Bug That Resurfaced Deleted Photos
Last week, some iPhone users reported that Apple's iOS 17.5 update had introduced a bug that caused old photos that were deleted to reappear in...
www.macrumors.com
It’s really completely unclear from their language. Looking at the change-log Apple has for 17.5.1 it’s possible that could be true, but I noticed photos that I haven’t seen in years. Even if I assume I just haven’t looked back at them, creating a placebo effect, then looking at my data usage for photos changing by 14.5GB lower than before and still having some size of an “other” category on a 512GB Ipad Pro, still doesn’t make sense because I didn’t delete anywhere near that much data to do the install. It’s the opposite direction I would have expected, but the only explanation I can think of for that happening prior to the 17.7 update is if the storage used number ignores the “other” category, which I’ve never noticed happening before and doesn’t sound like something Apple would do. I might do a backup and restore as a test, out of curiosity, but that’s how I got forced into buying a new iPad the last time and I worry about the backup dropping the “other” if it really is photos/videos. Regardless, I haven’t seen any photos/videos that I originally noticed missing from the early years of 2011-2013 reappear, which might indicate they were lost as other data in a backup and could be lost by other means than are recoverable by this software change.Good to know.
Basically, it seems like you’re saying Apple refined the activity associated with iOS 17.5 by adding information dialog boxes.
Apple Sheds More Light on iOS 17.5 Bug That Resurfaced Deleted Photos
Last week, some iPhone users reported that Apple's iOS 17.5 update had introduced a bug that caused old photos that were deleted to reappear in...
My recollection, because I was in such a rush or too shortsighted to think of it in 20 or 30 seconds to screenshot what would be restored, and my memory is that the restored photos/videos didn’t go back to 2015, they were 2016 and up. There were, nonetheless things in there that I couldn’t understand how there would have been data corruption other than a software difference, but Apple boasts so much about photography you would think that could never be a problem.
Their support page says explicitly that some photos or videos were excluded from the photo library for certain reasons, including, database corruption, photos not saving properly, and I saw photos in there that I hadn’t seen in a long time (that would be database corruption usually). They also cite things like apps not working properly that aren’t apple apps, they also state that they were found on the device, not necessarily in the library. About it being iOS 17.5, I don’t know if that’s the case, for some reason I thought my iPhone did a 17.4 update, but I think I’m wrong because I screenshotted my data storage scale and iOS version on my iPad that I was updating to and the iPad went to 17.7 first. I didn’t do the screenshot for the first iPhone update, but regardless I remember that I recently tried to update the iPhone software and it said it was up to date, so it had to be 17.6.1 making the next update before 18 17.7. I didn’t go to the Photos app on the 17.7 at all, I went straight to update to 18.
But Apple says in that support post that it was a notification for iOS 18 or iPadOS 18. I also think my previous devices were on 17.5 at least. I only mentioned it because I wanted to point out the order of software changes. I was curious about extra size of 18 and that’s why I was screenshotting the settings app. The only surprise to me was at first it gave a smallish amount of space it needed to install, like 2 or 3GB, but then it refused to install after downloading on the iPad and wanted 7 more GB’s and I was like “really? That doesn’t sound appropriate from my memory of full-integer updates.” But it could have been some kind of preloading of AI features too that are still disabled in order to avoid being a bigger headache.
(On the database corruption point: Apple had a massive security hole exposed in, I think 2017, about iMessage where someone could access and modify/insert/change messages to whatever they wanted. They might have had to do a huge overhaul of their database library system in order to fix it and it would be interesting to see if the timeline of the changes is aligned with people’s recovered photos.)
Might as well copy and paste the first section in:
“Your iPhone or iPad can identify previously lost or damaged photos and videos that are on your device. You can choose to permanently delete or restore them to your Photos library.
In iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, there is a Recovered album in the Utilities section of Photos. This album displays images or videos that are on your device but not currently part of your library. Photos or videos can become lost due to several reasons, including a database corruption issue, photos taken in a camera app that did not save correctly to the Photos library, or third-party apps that are given access to manage your photo library.
When you update to iOS 18 or iPadOS 18, your iPhone or iPad automatically scans for photos and videos that can be recovered. From the Recovered album, you can select a photo or video and choose to either permanently delete it or restore it to your library.”
^BTW: this paragraph and the disclaimer not included in this that’s at the bottom of Apple’s support page, in context of a recent lawsuit against Apple for unintentionally exposing infidelity and ending a guy’s marriage, sounds like it was written by a lawyer. Partly to avoid a class action lawsuit over misrepresentation of photo security, property damage of photographers, and lawsuits over emotional harm. It’s definitely the reason FaceID is required to see the photos, because if anyone has syncing enabled they’ll be sent to other devices which was the basis of the afformentioned lawsuit. It’s written as well as it could be, though.
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