IPhone – get the pictures back if we all shared the iCloud

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.

Once you start using the iPhone on your account, and activate iMessage, you will no longer be able to receive SMS on the Galaxy from any contacts who use iPhones, because from Apple's perspective, your number will now be an iMessage number.

If you wait until you're ready to leave to do this, that will work. However, if you pause/cancel/whatever your service with Sprint, you will only be able to receive iMessages if the person has the email address associated with your Apple ID in your contact on their iPhone, and you have that email address set up for receiving in iMessage settings on your iPhone. If your service stays active, messages from other iPhone users will still be received by your phone via your phone number, but only if you're connected to Wi-Fi (or enable data roaming, which would probably be a bad idea if you like keeping your money).

Once you get back, assuming you want to resume using the Galaxy, you'll want to deregister your number from iMessage or you will back in the same predicament as far as not being able to trade messages with iPhone users.