How to get photos off iPhone? Out hard drive died and it's the only backup!

[Whenisitmysleepytime]

The external harddrive thingy died and it has all our photos on. :(
We have a back up of everything up to feb this year but after that the only copies are on the iPhone and iPods.

How do you get the pictures off?
You can't get at them in any obvious way such a looking in finder as far as I can see. ( we have a mac)

Please help all dd's birth photos aren't backed up! :(

[CoteDAzur]

Doesn't iPhoto start up when you connect your iPhone to the Mac?

[Whenisitmysleepytime]

Yes but as pics library was on the now dead hard drive it can't find them.

[Whenisitmysleepytime]

And pc world just told dh it'll be £700 torecover the data as the hard drive is so weird!!!!!!!

[RustyBear]

Which version of iphoto/OS do you have? i have iphoto11 and Lion and when I connect my iPhone or iPad it automatically gives the option of uploading any pictures.

You can change settings - go to iphoto menu and preferences and see what 'Connecting camera opens....' is set to.

[Whenisitmysleepytime]

Sorry dd keeps knocking my arm.
Weird meaning it's a Linux system and so non standard I'm guessing.

[MmeLindor.]

You should be able to go in through computer-iphone-photos directly.

When you plug iPhone in, click START then "computer" - can you see the iphone?

[MmeLindor.]

Ah, ignore me. I see you have a Mac.

[SoupDragon]

can you download an app such as Picasa's "Web Albums" ... This lets you upload them from your phone direct to an onne album.

[SoupDragon]

Online album..

[RustyBear]

You should be able to create a new library - hold down the option key as you open iphoto and it will allow you to create a new library in a different place.

[BadgersPaws]

Yes iPhoto is the way with a Mac.

However it might not be configured to auto-start when the iPhone is connected. However if you run it up manually with the iPhone connected to the Mac then you should see it appear and be able to import from it.

[HauntedLittleLunatic]

They must be there somewhere you will just have to browse the directory structure (i am assuming you can with MAC type stuff?)

Does the iPhone have a microSD card you can recover them with an appropriate adapter?

Worst case scenario can you email them all to yourself from the phone or upload to fb/similar and then download from there?

[BadgersPaws]

"Weird meaning it's a Linux system and so non standard I'm guessing."

Unless you've done something quite techy I'd lay money on that external drive being in FAT32 format, that means that it's equally readable by both PCs and Macs, therefore it's the most common disk format.

So PC world's quote probably has nothing to do with it being Linux, they're just trying to rip you off and usually don't know what they're talking about anyway. I would never ever turn to them for advice.

[MmeLindor.]

If all else fails, download the Dropbox app, upload all photos (you can do this much quicker than emailing them to yourself) and access from Dropbox desktop.

Or wait a while for the iCloud - would that do the same thing?

[BadgersPaws]

"They must be there somewhere you will just have to browse the directory structure (i am assuming you can with MAC type stuff?)"

Not with iPhone's, Apple by default don't let you monkey around with the actual physical storage on iOS devices.

There are software tools that will let you do this.

But let's get iPhoto working first and then the photos should just come off of the phone with no trouble at all.

[niceguy2]

I had this about 18 months ago when I thought I'd lost my entire photo library.

Firstly are the photos you want to recover on the iphone/ipod camera? Or are they synched albums? What I mean is. The photos you want to recover. Were they taken with your iphone or ipod? Or were they taken with a real camera then uploaded to the Apple device?

The reason I ask is because as I found, iTunes doesn't copy across the real file. It makes a small version then copies that across. So what you will find is if you can recover it, the photo will look rubbish on anything other than your iphone.

However, if it really is the difference between not having them at all then check out Iphone Explorer

If you plug your external hard drive in, does the Mac see any disk at all? What I'm trying to figure out is if the drive is physically broken or just corrupted in some way. If it's the latter, you have hope. There are tools out there which can help.

And lastly sorry you've had to learn this the hard way but that's why I say to people, never EVER use just the external disk for storing photos.

[BadgersPaws]

"And lastly sorry you've had to learn this the hard way but that's why I say to people, never EVER use just the external disk for storing photos.'

Can I expand that to a general rule of never ever storing anything important in just one place? It doesn't matter if that one place is an external disk drive, your computers own drive, a memory stick or something else entirely.

It's an unfortunate fact of computer life that storage devices will fail, and having it in one place is asking for trouble.

I'll also add a bit more to the rule if I can, check that your backups are OK. So don't just burn them to a CD and file them away untouched for years to come. I've seen a number of times where people turn to backups only to find out that the backups are corrupt.

So backup to more than one place and check your backups.

[MmeLindor.]

Badger/Niceguy
I have been thinking about this recently, as I have all my photos saved on external hard drive. Is it best to put them onto a disc? I have toyed with buying a second hard drive to put them on. I hate having loads of discs around.

[BadgersPaws]

Just have the photos in at least two places that you can keep an eye on.

For example I've got all of my photos on my computer and also on an external disk drive. Whenever I put new photos onto the computer they also go onto the disk drive, and that helps me to check that the disk drive is still working.

There is a chance that both could explode at the same time, but that's something that I accept.

What I should really do is look into an off site backup solution, some disk space at a friends house or in the "cloud" somewhere.

When I had a smaller computer I used to back up to both the external drive and CDs/DVDs. The worry with disks like that is how often do you look at them? I have had CD-ROMs degrade on me and fail, and so this is a real risk of data loss.

There are also more serious home disk drives with various degrees of multi-disk support. So they might for example have two disks in them and always write the same data to both, the box will then warn you if one of the disks fails giving you a chance to sort it out before loosing both of them. That's pretty secure and not too expensive. But it still is "on site" and therefore at risk of something catastrophic happening to the entire box.

[MmeLindor.]

Yes, that is the problem. In the event of something awful (like a housefire) then having the photos backed up onto a disk is not really going to be helpful. Although, I guess the photos would the the least of our worries.

I cannot keep them on the PC, not enough space. I take a lot of photos.

[BadgersPaws]

"In the event of something awful (like a housefire) then having the photos backed up onto a disk is not really going to be helpful."

No, and that's why I suggesting that an "off site" solution is best, I really should be looking into this. So I'm wondering if anyone is going to suggest some reasonably priced cloud storage... A short term and simple solution is to keep an external disk drive at a friends house and once in a while make sure that it's up to date.

So what you could do is to have two disk drives, one at your friends house and one at your own. Swap them over once a month and keep them up to date, the window of vulnerability then drops to a months worth of photos being lost if you loose your drives.

"I cannot keep them on the PC, not enough space. I take a lot of photos."

Again keep them in two places, always.

So either have two external drives at your house (and possibly swap one of those out to your friends once a month as suggested above) or have an external disk and something else (burn to disc, cloud, etc.). But whatever that "something else is" make it something that you check. Just burning to disk and then popping them at the back of the cupboard for years is a big risk. Well I think it's a big risk, maybe I just worry too much :)

[RustyBear]

Does anyone know how much space we're going to get for how much when iCloud appears?

[BadgersPaws]

"Does anyone know how much space we're going to get for how much when iCloud appears?"

5gb, which isn't much but....

Things you buy from an Apple Store (e.g. music from iTunes) won't take up any of that limit and there's a photo storage service from compatible devices that will hold 1000 photos and not take up that 5gb capacity. However thats not much use for someone with a non-iOS device camera, unless it syncs with iPhoto, but even then 1000 photos isn't much.

I'm beginning to think that this should be a serrate thread, apologies to the OP for somewhat derailing it.

[MmeLindor.]

Rusty
I have been wondering about that. My guess is that the basic option will be small, but you will be able to upgrade (like they did with mobileme)

[RustyBear]

"1,000 photos isn't much"

True, I currently have 9,324 and rising..

I have them all on my MacBook and external backup drive and also on my iPad - the iPhone only has a couple of albums plus those I've taken on it.
But if we had a major fire, I'd still be in trouble.

I think I may do what DH does and get another external drive to do TimeMachine backups of my Mac, keep one at work and swap as BadgersPaws suggested.