How to fix iPhone not saving pictures
Those of you who follow me on Twitter, or who read the sidebar of this blog, know that I’ve had a rather unfun week with a non-functional iPhone due to Apple and AT&T confusion after the iPhone 2.0 update. Thankfully, it was all finally resolved yesterday, when a very helpful tech at AT&T was able to find the *one* person who knew how to fix the problem. Once that person was found, it was all resolved in 5 minutes and my iPhone activated properly, as it should have from the start. I’ll be writing a diatribe post about my iPhone-less week later, but after everything was fixed, one thing wasn’t: my iPhone was no longer taking pictures… or rather, it took the pictures, but couldn’t save them, so they just disappeared. Also, none of the old pictures on the phone could be deleted. Restoring the phone didn’t resolve the issue.
To resolve this problem, you have to delete the backup of your iPhone that iTunes uses and completely erase everything on the iPhone to make sure you kill whatever corrupted file is causing the problem. This means you will lose all your iPhone’s settings, but all the data (bookmarks, songs, media in iTunes, contacts in Address Book, etc) should be nicely on your system via your last sync.
Step 1: Sync your iPhone to your Mac one final time
Step 2: Disconnect your iPhone from your computer. On your iPhone, go to Settings–>General–>Reset and select Erase All Content and Settings. Verify that you want to do it, and yes, the warning it gives you is correct: It will take about an hour.
Step 3: While your iPhone is erasing, lets delete some files on your Mac. Go to /YourHomeFolder/Library/Application Support/Mobile Sync/Backup/ and either delete or move and archive any files ending in .mdbackup in that folderthe folders contained within that folder. These are the archived backups of your iPhone.
Step 4: After your iPhone finishes erasing itself, connect it to iTunes and do a fresh sync. Everything should work properly again. Now have fun setting all your settings all over again!
Major thanks to Scott Robinette for providing this information in this thread (I cannot find a permalink to his comment or I would have linked it directly):
Apple - Support - Discussions - iPhone Camera not saving pictures ….
September 30th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
is it possible to access iphone files on a pc?