IOS – How to retrieve photos back after iTunes backup upload in iPhone 7 and iOS 13

There is no way, unless it was backed up somehow. If iCloud was enabled, and backed up recently, you will be able to restore it from an iCloud backup. Here is an article detailing the restore of an iCloud backup http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4859 .

When you restore a phone, or start over, there will be three options on the initial wizard (iOS 5 only - which is on the 4S). The three options are Restore from iCloud backup, Restore from iTunes backup, as well as Setup as new iPhone. As a result, the only real restores you can do is iCloud (which is extremely easy), as well as iTunes (which is very similar, only you must connect to your computer). iCloud automatically backs up every night if (1) your phone is connected to wifi (2) your phone is locked and (3) your phone is locked, therefore it often can be more recent then iTunes.

Turns out I solved the issue by just wiping my phone and restoring it from that same Sept 27 iCloud backup again. It had the photos in the backup after all. As to why it didn't download them to my phone when I restored from that backup a month ago, I'll probably never know.

Before I actually wiped/restored, I wanted to make sure that the backup actually had the photos in it. Of course Apple doesn't let you see the data in your backups, so I had to download a 3rd party backup viewer on my mac to look at the pictures in the backup file. Once I saw the photos were really there in iCloud, I decided to just restore from that backup and see what happens. It ended up working. Weird.