IOS – How to completely erase the Photo Library on an iPhone

Before a sync or restore, I believe that iTunes will create a backup of your phone's contents (unless you manually cancel this backup). The backup will contain the photos and videos that were on the phone.

You can check if a backup was created by doing the following:

1. Launch iTunes
2. iTunes > Preferences > Devices
3. See if there is an entry with the date of the restore.

If a backup exists, you can recover your data with one of two methods:

• Restore your phone using that backup; or
• Use an application such as iPhone Backup Extractor to extract the images out of the backup file.

Hopefully you have the run of the mill, the iPod Photo Cache is now stale issue which is easily remedied.

• iTunes: Understanding the iPod Photo Cache folder - TS1314

Since you are on Mountain Lion, this is just a folder in the "iPhoto Library" and you can right click on it, and show package contents. Just drag that folder to trash and then quit both iPhoto (and Aperture if you have it) as well as iTunes.

A re-launch of iTunes should see that the folder is missing and clear any sync tokens, and proceed to rebuild a list of pictures, albums and events. Usually, there isn't a second step needed as this folder is designed to be safe to delete at any time to save space on a drive and exists to speed up syncing.

As always, kicking off a backup when looking into deleting things is never a bad idea in case the corruption is deeper than expected or just a sign of a failing storage device.