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Will iCloud backup my camera roll?

B

Bgriz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 12, 2011
19
0
It's taking over 3 hours to backup the iPhone to iCloud so it is still updating.
My question is: when I log into iCloud I can see my contacts there but no photos from the camera roll. There is no icon for photos on the iCloud screen. Only contacts, calender, find my iphone, iwork and mail. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.
 
did you turn photo stream on? I believe that is how you see photos on the iCloud website.

It does look like it will include the camera roll in your backups to iCloud. In the iOS 5 settings there are options to turn on/off what exactly backs up to iCloud.

settings>icloud>storage&backup>manage storage>(idevice)
 
Thank you for your reply.

All of that is marked "on" , so it should be viewable on iCloud.com I would
think. ?
 
I just tested the photo stream thing and it doesn't show up on the iCloud site for me either. maybe it doesn't. in the iCloud settings on my computer it says iPhoto or aperture required so maybe its just between devices and not on the website.
 
You can't view these photos from iCloud.com when it does back them up right? It's just backed up in the event something went wrong and you could restore them all?
 
Photostream only uploads the pictures you've added/taken since you activated it.

iCloud backup backups all your photos if you've enabled it as described above, however you won't be able to view them on icloud.com.
 
My problem is that after backing up prior to iOS 5 and then installing iOS 5, there are no pictures in the camera roll at all. I've since tried to restore from the prior backup and nothing...

Also what's weird is that since the iOS 5 update, the camera shutter will click, the photo will "Seem" to move to the bottom left corner into the camera roll. But when i click on the thumbnail image to open it, I am sent to the "There are no pictures" white screen. This is the same for videos as well.

Are these iOS 5 issues or hardware issues with incredible timing?
 
ks4au97 said:
My problem is that after backing up prior to iOS 5 and then installing iOS 5, there are no pictures in the camera roll at all. I've since tried to restore from the prior backup and nothing...

Also what's weird is that since the iOS 5 update, the camera shutter will click, the photo will "Seem" to move to the bottom left corner into the camera roll. But when i click on the thumbnail image to open it, I am sent to the "There are no pictures" white screen. This is the same for videos as well.

Are these iOS 5 issues or hardware issues with incredible timing?
Click to expand...

Same thing happened to my wife's phone after installing iOS5.
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13606033

I finally gave up and wiped the phone and started from scratch.

My iPhone was upgraded just fine.

-Kevin
 
OK, here's where I am. I went to the Apple Store and they told me the data was likely lost. Not willing to accept that quite yet i found another post about software that helps you look through your phone to see what's on it:

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

I downloaded the phone view demo (free) and was able to locate all of the pictures in the Disk -> DCIM -> 100APPLE folder.

You can then copy from phone to your mac and you'll at least have the pictures in a safe place.

Now i just have to figure out why the iPhone won't display any of these pictures when they're clearly there...

Hope this helps

Kyle
 
ks4au97 said:
OK, here's where I am. I went to the Apple Store and they told me the data was likely lost. Not willing to accept that quite yet i found another post about software that helps you look through your phone to see what's on it:

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

I downloaded the phone view demo (free) and was able to locate all of the pictures in the Disk -> DCIM -> 100APPLE folder.

You can then copy from phone to your mac and you'll at least have the pictures in a safe place.

Now i just have to figure out why the iPhone won't display any of these pictures when they're clearly there...

Hope this helps

Kyle
Click to expand...

I ended up grabbing the iTunes backup of my wife's phone and manually getting the photos that way.

The bigger problem with my wife's phone was the phone, and iCloud backup, thought there was 900MB of space being taken up in the camera roll. No way to fix.

I ended up wiping my wife's phone and starting from scratch......took a few hours, but I'm happy to have everything working again.

-Kevin
 
kbmb said:
I ended up grabbing the iTunes backup of my wife's phone and manually getting the photos that way.

The bigger problem with my wife's phone was the phone, and iCloud backup, thought there was 900MB of space being taken up in the camera roll. No way to fix.

I ended up wiping my wife's phone and starting from scratch......took a few hours, but I'm happy to have everything working again.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

I am having the same problem with my phone. iCloud claims my camera roll backup will use 3.4GB worth of space but there are ONLY 3 photos there. I am hoping there is another solution other than wiping the phone and starting from a clean slate.
 
Bump the last post. I am in a similar situation saying the camera roll backup size will be much larger than what is actually on my phone?
 
I'm having the same problem. What are people doing that have large photo collections in their camera roll?
 
gjb11 said:
I'm having the same problem. What are people doing that have large photo collections in their camera roll?
Click to expand...

You really should get that stuff off your camera roll and onto a computer somewhere so that it could be backed up.
 
I'm just scared to turn the camera roll off in iCloud bc it says something about deleting pictures etc. Are people with big camera rolls turning iCloud backup off and backing up to iPhoto?
 
I use iCloud to back up my camera roll. Here is what I do:

  • Enable photostream on my iPhone
  • Enable photostream in iPhoto on my Mac
  • Enable "auto create events for photostream" in iPhoto
  • Export from photostream so I have copies of my jpg images outside of iPhoto
  • Import them back into iPhoto so the event names are the same as the folder names I use (optional)
  • Delete the auto-created photostream events so the photos aren't taking up space in my iPhoto library any more (optional)
  • hook up usb and use image capture to get movies off my iPhone since photostream only handles jpg images

I also upload my pics to one of three sites: Picasaweb, Flickr and Smugmug. Each has advantages and really important photos get backed up to multiple places. I will soon be shutting down my mobile me galleries which are being replaced by my smugmug galleries.

hope this helps...
 
gjb11 said:
That seems so complex.
Click to expand...

I admit it does but I tend to go a little overboard when managing my photo collection. The first of 2 kids is already gone off to college and I want to make sure our family photos don't wind up being lost in the event of some mishap either on my computer or online. The minimum required to back up one's camera roll is really just 3 steps:

  1. enable photostream on device
  2. enable photostream in iphoto
  3. enable autocreate events for photostream in iphoto *

* This last step gets around the 1,000 image limit where photos start to disappear from photostream as they will be in permanent iPhoto events. I haven't hit the limit yet but I'm days away from hitting it. Another reason for the complexity of my method is I never want originals of my photos sitting in iPhoto Library. My iPhoto Library climbed to 67 GB a few years back and it "crashed" in that I could no longer access the files from finder using "show package contents" and iPhoto went off to beachball kingdom every time I launched it. After that incident, I removed the setting to copy imported items to iPhoto Library and all has been well ever since with my 10 GB iPhoto Library managing meta data for around 200 GB of photos.
 
gjb11 said:
What about if I don't want to use photo stream?
Click to expand...

Another alternative to wireless photo backup is Eyefi software for iOS. It's a bit clunky but it does work. If you own a digicam with an eyefi wifi SD card, you have a wifi account and that's all that's required to use the iOS app. I don't know if there's a way to create an eyefi account without purchasing the sd card and setting it up for use on a camera.

There are also other options such as Adobe carousel (or whatever it's called this week), photobucket (caution: severe image downsampling) and even smugmug has a free iOS app to auto-upload to their subscription based site.

Why don't you want to use Photostream? I went to a family event recently and because there was wifi in the place, pictures I snapped on my iphone could be viewed on my iPad in another room seconds later. I may not be thrilled with every aspect of Photostream but having pictures I shoot show up seconds later on a big iPad screen is "magical."
 
Camera Roll Size Much Smaller than Reported

Cuprous said:
I am having the same problem with my phone. iCloud claims my camera roll backup will use 3.4GB worth of space but there are ONLY 3 photos there. I am hoping there is another solution other than wiping the phone and starting from a clean slate.
Click to expand...

I'm having the same problem, too. Did anyone figure out a solution other than wiping the phone?
 
iCloud does back up your camera roll but only for a restore. You can access it via the web.

For those talking about Photostream that's not the same thing.

What I would suggest OP is to get any videos you have off the phone onto your PC as they will be large and take up a lot of space. The first back up takes a while but it will get easier and quicker and you won't even realise its backing up :)

----------
Cuprous said:
I am having the same problem with my phone. iCloud claims my camera roll backup will use 3.4GB worth of space but there are ONLY 3 photos there. I am hoping there is another solution other than wiping the phone and starting from a clean slate.
Click to expand...

Don't wipe the phone just delete the back up and then back up the phone again
 
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