Photo recovery

Tam-scot wrote:

I have an Iphone 13 pro! I was so use to face ID that I forgot my passcode. My phone was security locked and the only option I was to erase the phone.

Ive lost some pictures which were taken 3 hours before my phone was locked. The photos weren’t backed up.

I’ve tried Dr.fone and UltData to try and recover the photos but the missing photos aren’t showing up.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Those photos aren't recoverable as it wasn't backed up, there is no software that can recover that.

Those recovery programs cannot recover any data when the device is erased by restoring it. Since the iPhone encrypts all data, restoring it when you forgot your passcode destroyed the decrypt keys so there is now no way to recover files or data.

Those kind of apps only work if the device was not erased entirely - if you’d been able to unlock and use the device, those programs can recover individual, recently deleted files (also assuming the device was not used much since the file was deleted). But they are useless when the entire device has been erased, which is exactly how iOS and iPadOS are designed to be and why they use data encryption. It ensures nobody is recovering data from a restored device except the owner who presumably would have data backups to restore from.

For the future, enable iCloud Photos (or install Google Photos, Dropbox, box.com, shutterfly, etc) and your photos will be safely uploaded to whichever service or services you choose as soon as they are taken.

As noted, the decrypt keys are gone and unrecoverable. Also - the physical locations could be random. The could have been block erased during reformatting, and that's pretty much unrecoverable even if they weren't encrypted. It's really not worth trying to scour through the flash memory because of that.