I found my mother's old iPhone 3, which contains irreplaceable photos of my late great-grandfather, my brother, and me. I've been trying to recover them for years, but the phone won't properly connect to my home internet or hotspot. It has no SIM card, and sending the photos by email or messages doesn't work. I connected it to a newer Mac, but Finder kept asking me to unlock the phone even though it was already unlocked. Backing it up only produced folders and files with coded names that I don't know how to open. The photos were never synced to iCloud either. Image Capture didn't detect the phone, and CopyTrans isn't supported on my Mac. Is there a reliable way to transfer the photos without risking losing them?
3 Answers
The coded folders from a backup may still contain the photos, but they aren’t meant to be opened manually. You would need a compatible backup-extraction tool, and modern software may not support backups from such an old iOS version. Since the pictures are irreplaceable, consider using an older compatible computer or a professional data-recovery service rather than repeatedly experimenting with the original device.
Try Apple’s Image Capture utility while the phone is connected and unlocked. It can sometimes import photos directly even when Finder doesn’t show the device. Because the phone is so old, though, a newer macOS may not recognize it properly. If possible, try an older Mac or an older macOS installation.
Older iPhones can sometimes be accessed through Apple File Conduit, or AFC. A computer running Debian or another Linux distribution may recognize the phone more reliably and let you browse its media files. This is fairly technical, so make a backup of anything you can first and avoid changing or deleting files on the phone.
I tried Image Capture, but my newer Mac didn’t detect the phone at all. I may need to find an older Mac to test it.