IOS – How to recover photos from a stolen 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.

After a lot of research it seems like the only way to do this is by using special software, none of which are free.

My solution was a lengthy workaround of copying my photos off of my iMac, and onto a DVD, then offload them onto my home computer.