Daily Archives: June 24, 2008

iPhone Picture Woes – Blank Pictures

My iPhone has become increasingly less stable when it comes to taking pictures – I found an Apple discussion a while back that suggested a reset to factory settings and then taking one picture before doing the restore – that seemed to work – but the problem keeps coming back.

So more surgery seems necessary. I did some more digging and came up with this discussion:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1183455

This adds some good hacking to the reset pattern – you go into a weird directory and delete a weirdly named file – this sounds like the kind of stuff that will work.

I really don’t want to jailbreak my phone for the sole purpose of working around a bug that Apple could fix with one hand tied behind its back!

The trick is to delete a file that configures the “next photo number”. Interestingly in the file that I deleted and in the file mentioned in the above it has moved beyond taking 1023 or 1024 pictures. Hmm – something crapping out when it is near a power of two.

My hypothesis is that this problem is probably a combination of iPhoto and iPhone and when we delete the file – we avoid the problem for the next 1024 pictures… Hmmm.

The cool thing about this is that once you perform this – you can once again go into iPhoto – import all, and then delete all – and your iPhone camera is not bricked! Also you can manually delete all the photos on the iPhone and the camera is not bricked.

So it seems as though you just need to backup your iPhone, Restore it to factory settings, remove this file than Restore the iPhone from backup and you have another 1024 worry-free pictures! Only time will tell. In a funny irony, one of the blog posts was titled “My iPhone ran out of film!” – in a way – this is true – because of the bug, some iPhones only have 1024 pictures in them when they come from the factory – so it did run out of film. OK – perhaps that was only funny to me.

The nice thing is that now that I have a workaround for the bug, I don’t need to buy a 3G phone quite so soon – a phone without a camera – really makes me unhappy.

At some point I got so mad that I went into conspiracy mode and suspected Apple of introducing this bug – just to get me to buy a 3G phone – because I never saw it until the 1.1.4 update – but if it is just a 1024 issue – the more rational explanation is that it just took me that long to get to 1024 pictures.

It would be good if folks who find their iPhone camera messed up to look at the contents of the file and see if the 1024 (or 1023) pattern holds.

My instructions are below.

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