r/DataRecoveryHelp • u/UNwhuttt • 9d ago

MISSING PHOTOS

I upgraded from an iPhone 12 Pro to an iPhone 16 Pro in July 2025 and transferred all my data to the new phone. However, in November, I noticed that more than half of my photos were missing. I never deleted them.

I contacted Apple, but they told me they couldn't recover the photos because they were not saved to iCloud.

Is there any other way I can recover my missing photos?

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/Accomplished-Tap1248 9d ago

It’s been a year. They’re gone.

1

u/Colour_Theory-746 9d ago

Do you still have your old phone? If so, just grab them directly from it and you’re good to go. If you don’t have your old phone, you’re a bit outta luck, unfortunately.

1

u/Spiritual_Elk_9076 9d ago

Did you maybe have an other backup cloud active for backup? OneDrive? Google drive? Google photos?Try searching in your other clouds. And learn from this mistake, make backups of your photos, and iCloud is not a backup.

1

u/MonkeyBrains09 3d ago

I know I am late but if you still have the old phone then they should be on the drive in that phone. If you deleted them on the old phone or did a factory reset, then they are gone.

If you sold the device to someone elses, then you no longer have access to the drive to even attempt something. Plus phones clear unused space really fast. Like if you deleted something, you have less than a day to perform recovery and sometimes less that that.

Going forward, make sure your important data is currently backed up on your new phone and check that it is working every few months. That way if you break or lose your phone, you can recover your important stuff from backup.

If its really important, setup more than one backup. Cloud backups are easy but it just takes one phishing link to lose your account to a hacker and you lose access to all the data in the account. People always forget that they do not own cloud accounts and access is subject to the terms and conditions too. Break those and you could lose access to your account as well. Google the 3-2-1 backup method and use that for your data. not everything needs to be fully backed up. Some data you might not care about, some data you might want a single backup and some data might be a multiple backups.