All my photos before October 2016 have disappeared from my phone and iCloud with ios26 update

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All my photos before October 2016 have disappeared from my phone and iCloud with ios26 update

I updated my phone a few weeks ago to ios26. Since then I noticed that all my photos before the 25 October 2016 have completely disappeared from my phone and iCloud. I have checked the deleted folder, hidden photos, iCloud.com. I have gone round in circles with Apple chat who have tried to restore them but that did not work. I finally got hold of someone in the Philippines who rang me last night. He took control of my phone and looked in all the places I had already looked and couldn't work it out. I have had to leave it with him to look into it. I have lost thousands of photos and videos including all the baby photos of my daughter. I am beyond upset about this. Has this happened to anyone else and did you manage to get help to fix it please?

iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 26

Posted on Oct 20, 2025 3:42 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 21, 2025 7:50 AM in response to Furnando09

That sounds horrible to me! But I fear that nothing can be done to help. I wonder what made these particular pictures different from the others. Some pictures transferred from a computer can be viewed in Photos but they can't be modified by Photos or transferred to iCloud, and there may be some operations that produce a warning about those being at risk. So if you’re missing pictures that were transferred from a computer, then you should look on the computer they came from and backups of those computer files. Unfortunately, I'm afraid, if you don't keep your own backups to an external drive, then there really isn't any place else to look. Certainly, don't pay people money to try to recover stuff on the phone-- phone storage doesn't work that way.

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