Photo difficulties with Apple’s iPhone OS 4 upgrade
I upgraded my iPhone today to the latest operating system. It took an hour or maybe an hour and a half, and it prompted me for clicks several times. When it was done, I unhappily discovered that many of my photos were missing. Pictures of my friend Pippa’s 60th birthday, were gone. Pictures of me and my 90 something year old grandpa were gone. Pictures of my best friends drinking coffee at Paul’s Motor Inn were gone. And pictures of my new friend’s violin were gone. All gone. 1 Is it weird that I have such an attachment to these digital files? Maybe. But it’s an attachment that Apple has helped nurture and it would be swell of them to try to make sure that upgrades don’t mess with my intellectual property. That’s a serious trust issue.
Luckily, I found this guy who had a solution to the missing photos issue. I actually didn’t implement his solution yet, but I downloaded the iPhone Explorer and found the photos on my phone and backed them up on my desktop. Now I’ll wait for Apple to provide a fix. The photos are there, they just need to be accessible via the iPhone camera roll.
- It’s actually a violin that he made. More on this soon, ↩
If you’ll forgive me for making an opportunistic dig: that’s Apple for you. Everything just works until it doesn’t, and then you find that the tools for overcoming the problem are not available or not legal.
Granted, in your case the tools *were* available, but I would make a high-stakes bet that if iPhone explorer were an app, Apple would reject it.