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Lost photos from iPhone 5S during manual transfer to PC

carriecat

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I have an iPhone 5s and I have to manually transfer photos to my PC as it is an old PC running an old version of Windows and therefore cannot download the newest version of iTunes. My phone isn't compatible with the old iTunes version we have on the PC, so the only way to transfer photos onto my PC is to do it manually through My Computer, then opening my iPhone, Internal Storage, then the DCIM folder.

Within the DCIM folder I had 5 sub folders of photos/videos and I chose to transfer 3 of those folders off of my phone and leave 2 folders worth on the phone. To do this I was using cut/paste from my phone to an external hard drive. At the time I could see all the photos on the phone and on my computer. After the 3 folders had transferred, I looked at my phone to see how many photos I had left in my camera roll and there were only 49 images and 34 videos. All of the videos are showing up as grey and I can't open them. There was meant to be over 1000 photos still on my phone. I then tried to open them from the DCIM folder on the computer and they all came up saying they couldn't be opened and that the file appears to be corrupt or damaged.

Does anybody know how I can access these photos again? I've tried unplugging and replugging my phone back into the PC and have tried turning it off and on. They are now not even showing up in the DCIM folder when I plug my phone in, whereas before I could see them but couldn't open them. I'm still running iOs 7.1.1 for the same reason that I have to manually transfer photos - because I can't access the newest version of iTunes and I wanted to back up the phone prior to installing a new iOs version because ironically, I was afraid that I would lose photos!

Any help or advice that can be given would be very much appreciated.
 
If the photos aren't on the hard drive or the iPhone 5s, they're unfortunately lost unless you've ever stored any of them elsewhere.

Also, for a large iOS jump from iOS 7 to iOS 9 is recommend updating through iTunes. An up to date version of iTunes would create a complete backup of your iPhone before doing the update.

An OTA update would normally not be recommended when updating 2 major iOS versions as the chance of update problems increases.
 
I have an iPhone 5s and I have to manually transfer photos to my PC as it is an old PC running an old version of Windows and therefore cannot download the newest version of iTunes. My phone isn't compatible with the old iTunes version we have on the PC, so the only way to transfer photos onto my PC is to do it manually through My Computer, then opening my iPhone, Internal Storage, then the DCIM folder.

Within the DCIM folder I had 5 sub folders of photos/videos and I chose to transfer 3 of those folders off of my phone and leave 2 folders worth on the phone. To do this I was using cut/paste from my phone to an external hard drive. At the time I could see all the photos on the phone and on my computer. After the 3 folders had transferred, I looked at my phone to see how many photos I had left in my camera roll and there were only 49 images and 34 videos. All of the videos are showing up as grey and I can't open them. There was meant to be over 1000 photos still on my phone. I then tried to open them from the DCIM folder on the computer and they all came up saying they couldn't be opened and that the file appears to be corrupt or damaged.

Does anybody know how I can access these photos again? I've tried unplugging and replugging my phone back into the PC and have tried turning it off and on. They are now not even showing up in the DCIM folder when I plug my phone in, whereas before I could see them but couldn't open them. I'm still running iOs 7.1.1 for the same reason that I have to manually transfer photos - because I can't access the newest version of iTunes and I wanted to back up the phone prior to installing a new iOs version because ironically, I was afraid that I would lose photos!

Any help or advice that can be given would be very much appreciated.

Sadly when you do a bulk move (or copy) from the iPhone to a older PC using an USB 1 or early 2.x port, there is a transfer bug where the phone pauses as the PC plays catch up writing the photos to the hard drive. That pause cause the picture that is next in queue to be written as a filename but with no data attached to the filename.

From now on I highly recommend you do a copy first, check all the thumbnails on the PC first and any that are blank, recopy those files only. Then once done, you can delete the photos on the iPhone.

And no, I have not found a way around this issue. But I have dealt with it several times. Especially when someone is using a Windows Tablet to download the photos.
 
If the photos aren't on the hard drive or the iPhone 5s, they're unfortunately lost unless you've ever stored any of them elsewhere.

Also, for a large iOS jump from iOS 7 to iOS 9 is recommend updating through iTunes. An up to date version of iTunes would create a complete backup of your iPhone before doing the update.

An OTA update would normally not be recommended when updating 2 major iOS versions as the chance of update problems increases.

Thank you, I have heard that before, that's why I haven't updated to the new iOs yet because I want to do it through iTunes on the PC, but the iTunes we have on our computer is an old version that's incompatible with my iphone. When we tried updating to the newest version of iTunes it said we couldn't because the computer is pretty old and only has windows XP which is too old for the new iTunes apparently.

I did set up iCloud back ups and it does it automatically apparently but I don't feel very sure of how it actually works. I looked for the latest back up when I remembered having set up iCloud back ups but the time of the last back up was after the photos had already seemed to disappear so I'm not sure what that means.
 
Sadly when you do a bulk move (or copy) from the iPhone to a older PC using an USB 1 or early 2.x port, there is a transfer bug where the phone pauses as the PC plays catch up writing the photos to the hard drive. That pause cause the picture that is next in queue to be written as a filename but with no data attached to the filename.

From now on I highly recommend you do a copy first, check all the thumbnails on the PC first and any that are blank, recopy those files only. Then once done, you can delete the photos on the iPhone.

And no, I have not found a way around this issue. But I have dealt with it several times. Especially when someone is using a Windows Tablet to download the photos.

Thanks so much for the info, will be sure to copy/paste from now on! Do you think this could be what happened even though the photos that I've lost were in a different folder to where I was cut/pasting from?
 
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