Where does iTunes back up your pictures?

snakester9

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So today my iphone decided to eat all of my pictures. I went into the photos app and there was nothing there. Before I plug my phone back into iTunes I need to know where it backs the pictures up to so I can get at least most of them back. If I plug it in now I imagine it will just delete the ones. That it's already backed up. Thanks!
 

Alli

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You can neither selectively restore from iTunes, nor pull photos from a backup. You will have to restore to see if they are there. Were you not using Photostream?
 

snakester9

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You can neither selectively restore from iTunes, nor pull photos from a backup. You will have to restore to see if they are there. Were you not using Photostream?

I wound up disabling Photostream at the same time I disabled iCloud because I got sick of it whining about how I have no space left (I take a LOT of pictures and videos). I know I've lost my most recent pictures (from a road trip none the less) because i havent been able to do a backup to my laptop because the hard drive is small. However I know my backup contains most of them. Is there a way to "trick" iTunes into letting me make a backup of my phone in the state its in now, restore my last backup, get the pics off by transferring them off, then restoring to my picless backup AFTER I pull the old ones off.

Time isn't an issue, but I have a lot of pictures that I want back, and my phone definitely shouldn't have just randomly eaten them like it did... I thought one of the big things about the iPhone is not having to worry about crap like this. I appreciate the help VERY much.
 

Alli

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If you go into your iTunes settings, you can see all your dated backups. This is what you'll want to concentrate on. I don't recall the exact steps, but I believe you can do what you want to do.

Have you tried doing a reset to see if your photos are actually there?
 

snakester9

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If you go into your iTunes settings, you can see all your dated backups. This is what you'll want to concentrate on. I don't recall the exact steps, but I believe you can do what you want to do.

Have you tried doing a reset to see if your photos are actually there?

Yeah, and they're gone. My phone crashed after I hung up a call and when it rebooted my contacts and photos were gone. I did another reset and the contacts came back but the pictures are long gone.

EDIT: I managed to recover them using an iPhone filesystem explorer. Little ridiculous especially considering they were still on the phone the whole time. When I saw iTunes saying 9GB for "Other" I figured I'd poke around the filesystem a bit.
 
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peterthomas

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i dont think itune stores something in itself, its just a sort of protocol to connect the device to the computer and thats all!
 

Alx0052

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If you do have an iTunes backup and you know for sure that part of your photos are inside that backup you can use iPhone Backup Extractor to extract your photos for the backup. Test the free version, it should work for you.
 

Chase Isley

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^^^ yeah there are many different programs that you can use that can search for deleted or lost photos on the phone and even within backup files. Do a quick google search and you will find them. I also saw once where the guy's photos were not showing up in his camera roll or photostream, but when he connected the device to his windows computer, opened up the dcim folder that's on the phone, and the photos were there. There could be a weird glitch with the phone... It is worth a try.
 

Velmacg

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Aren't the photos saved in the iTunes backup? It may not have all of them, but when you back up your phone I think if you restore from a previous backup then you could possibly retrive them. I may be wrong, but I read somewhere a long time ago that it was an option. Have you ever backed up; not sync'd but backed up?
Once you do that, grab those photos (if it works) and then restore from the latest backup. Of course, you want to back up today then grab that previous backup. It is worth a try imo.
Related Tips about iPhone photo:
 

vtails

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My FIRST Post but I hope I can help with this PROBLEM,,first find your backups in mobile sync,then right click on each backup file to find the latest backup or the date closest to what your looking for,make a Temp file on desktop,and COPY that file to the temp folder,then open the folder and open the number file big long number,your doing this to find the path to that file thats open like C:\Documents and Settings\user\desktop\temp\number of the file here,the file name has to have the entire name in it or it will error,(it's somewhat confusing till you do it) .Now open run (do this in ADMIN) type CMD open it and type cd FILE NAME ( C:\Documents and Settings\user\desktop\temp\number),then type ren *. *.jpg hit enter it will do it thing and then come back to file name if you did it right this will change all the extensions to .jpg now open the temp folder and 2x click and it will open windows viewer and just start clicking next and it will show file name at top and if it was a picture it will open if it wasn't it doesnt show anything>
I found this oyt today cause I lost my BEST Friend and had pic's of him that got deleted off my phone so I was looking for a freeware program to pull pic's but haven't found any yet so this is how I am doing it right now. It took me a couple of tries to get this right but it does work and it doesn't cost anything but time once you do it goes fairly quick.the cmd is
ren*.space*.jpg this is what screwed me up for a bit. I probably didn't explain as good as I should have but give it a try remember to do it to a COPY of the file!!!
 

Hannah09311

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C:\Users\YourUsernameHere\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

What I did was I highlighted everything in that folder>Sent To>Compressed (.zip) Folder.
I moved the compressed folder to my desktop, and then E-Mailed it to myself using Google Drive, since the file was too big to send in an E-Mail. I traded in my iPhone before backing it up to Cloud (I never use online backups as I do not trust them) but luckily for me, I backed up immediately before I received my phone to my computer! (I need my screenshots of texts!) That's what I would do
 

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