What happened? Can I recover data?

[frustratednewb]

I have an iPhone 5s with ios 11 at minimum. I got it this summer in place of my old android. This is my first iPhone. I am moderately good with technology but don't know much about how apple works (icloud, itunes, etc). Anyway, while charging my phone a while back in the car (while parked) I noticed the charger was plugged in but it did not say that it was charging. I thought nothing of it and left it. About 15 minutes later I tried to check the time and no response from the device. Nothing shown on the screen, no indication whether it was charging, nothing. And nothing since. I have tried the hard reset with the home and power buttons multiple times for up to 2 minutes, nothing. I took it to some mall repair shop (only because the apple store was so busy) and he quickly and without taking it apart much tried a different battery and something else I didn't know (required a screw and a connector or two to take out). he concluded by saying "you have a software issue" and nothing more. He also used a inline meter and said it was taking no power. Also when plugged into the computer it is not seen by itunes or the computer itself. Now all that being said I do not care about the phone, that is easily replaceable. I do however care about the data that was on it, namely pictures. I did not have an itunes backup because I always charge off the wall and never the computer. I know doing that occasionally would have greatly eased my pain. But about a week before it died I got a message that my icloud storage was full so it would stop updating the backups. But now I log into icloud and it shows no pictures but almost a full 5gb of "backup". Phone also had 82% battery when this happened and i have left it charging overnight with no results. I am very hesitant to restore this device until i am 100% positive I cannot retrieve my data. Can anyone elaborate on any solutions or idea? What exactly is recovery and DFU modes and will it wipe the phone? Any help is greatly appreciated. Also I never did make it to an apple store as of now.

 

[Tartarus]

Hi, welcome to imore,

It seems to me that you had not enabled iCloud Photo Library, but had the photos included in the backup instead.
That’s why you won’t see them in iCloud as is.

Your only chance to access those photos is to restore that backup to another iPhone and export them to cloud service of your liking or enable iCloud Photo Library on that phone and wait for them to have uploaded.

Good luck. And let us know if there are any other question.

Gentle reminder: shorter sentences and use of paragraphs will make it much easier for people to read and make them more willing to help out.