Missing photos in iMessage after iOS 26 update

Had the same issue.

found a fix. Slightly annoying, but if you open the message thread with the person or group you had docs / pics / links history with and you click the top of the message on the name or “>” you should see towards the bottom of the “info” tab

”download ….. attachments”

***the “…..” above should be the number of attachments you’ve had in that thread. Attaching a photo. ***

to be clear - I have downloaded all messages from iCloud prior to this and you likely need to be on WiFi for it to work but I am not certain of that. I used this feature all the time on my 16pro and really annoying when it didn’t pop up after updating and getting air. Hope this helps!

[Edited by Moderator]

That is due to me having sent docs / photos / links since I got the phone. However those are the only ones that showed up. In order to get the full history back I restored the new phone from the icloud backup.

After that - still no photos tab with all photos dating back to 2015. I then went to settings > tapped my name at the very top > icloud > messages > sync now. This can take a while depending on how many messages you have saved in icloud and how long you have it set to save them for and the sync process for me took a few days to complete and required me to check multiple times a day because it will pause randomly for some reason. Once the sync was completed. I started to see the option to download the historical attachments under the info tab in each conversation.

The 'Photos' tab feature does still exist, however, it's not visible while the phone indexes them all.

If you don't have any 'Photos' tab, give it some time. I found it took about 48hrs for it to become visible again, though the amount of message photos you have may extend/reduce this time.

If you do have the tab, but it's incomplete (not all pictures shown), open Settings and go to Search > Messages. Turn off both toggles, wait a few seconds, and toggle them back on. The tab will likely be gone again but should reappear within 48hrs, this time displaying all the pictures.

Similar issue to everyone else. I already had a 16 Pro Max on 26.1; did a phone-to-phone transfer to a brand-new 17 Pro Max on 26.1 on 11/4/2025. The Photos tab was either missing or inconsistent (only showing some photos in conversations since the new 17 Pro Max. Tried a whole bunch of things. Including 3 calls with Apple support. Some techs said it would take 24-48 hours for indexing to complete. 5 days later still nothing. Called support again; they wanted me to do the transfer again, but the old phone was no longer available. What finally seemed to help was doing the following:

1. Settings
2. Search
3. Messages
4. Turned OFF Show App in Search. (that also removed Show Content in Search)
5. Waited 10 seconds (I actually went all the way back to the settings screen and then came back to it)
6. Turned it back ON

About 30 minutes later, convos that were missing the photos tab suddenly had it again. And the conversations that had the photos tab but only showed newer photos started showing old images.

Caveat: This seemed to work with MOST of the conversations, not all. But I'm only about 40 minutes into it since I changed the settings. I'm guessing the indexing has much more to do. I have messages dating back to 2010 (haven't deleted much). I really only checked the ones that had activity, including 2025. Starting with the newest to the oldest conversations, and it's working for most but not all. I'll report back in 24-48 hours and give it a chance to work in the background.

I'm not sure if toggling the search settings actually made it work or if just waiting 5 days would have done the trick...

For some reason my reply has been deleted -- but quickly -- I managed to solve this issue by doing the following:

• Subscribed to iCloud (had not done that previously, even though transferring phone to phone always used to work fine!)
• Backed up my OLD phone completely (took about 2 days!) - photos, messages, everything.
• Restored my information from the cloud to the NEW phone from a clean install (wiped clean from previous attempts, at the "Hello" screen, choose from iCloud restore)
• At first, it did not appear to work -- but in about 12-24 hours, the "Photos" tab began to appear under the text message threads. I then had to open each one, click on it, and scroll all the way to the end, and this "forced" it to populate all the blank image slots and load them.

At times, this process would bog down, and it would just have an image of a placeholder gif, so I would have to shut down the NEW phone, restart it, open the iMessages app, go back to that thread, go back to the photos tab, scroll again to wherever it left off, and it would start populating the images again.

It took me a few hours, but it did finally work, and has worked since then for a few weeks now without incident.

This was a terrible issue, and I don't intend to keep using iCloud like this -- it was just for this one off and then I'll cancel and do the backup to my computer as I had done before and hopefully for the next update, this does not happen!

I’ve found the temporary work around. I’m on iPhone 17pro and photos tab is missing. In messages search I can type the name of the contact followed by photos such as John Smith Photos and then it shows all photos in conversations with that contact. Not as good as the old way but at least gets the job done for now.

Go to Settings > Your Profile > iCloud > Messages, and turn off “Use on this iPhone” for Messages.

Then go to iPhone Storage > Messages, and delete all Documents and Data.

After that, re-enable Messages in iCloud — your phone will re-download all messages, and the Photos tab with all your pictures will reappear.

Last night seems I finally fixed mine. I searched someone’s name in messages and went to the pictures shared with that person. When I selected one it took me to that message in our conversation which happened to be a number of years ago.

I decided to spend time scrolling from then to current day and as I was going it kept loading the pictures in the conversation and now, the next morning, the pictures tab under their contact is there.

It was a little annoying that I had to take the time to scroll through 4 years of a text conversation to get it fixed but so far it seems to have worked. I hope this helps.

The reason the photos tab and documents tab shows up for me is because I have sent docs / photos/ links with this person since I have gotten the phone. Those were the only ones showing up under each tab though.

Additionally - after I restored my new phone from my icloud backup - I also went into my settings > icloud > messages and synched all of them - this process took a couple of days because the phone will pause the synch once you disconnect from wifi automatically and then you will have to go in and resume the synch again manually but then it will pause again if you re-connect to wifi and needs to be manually restarted. I also had 1.2m messages to synch so if you have less - it will likely be a lot quicker. Once that process completed each conversation under the info tab gave me the option to download all of the historical attachments. It is a slow process and will sporadically stop and need to be restarted but it worked for me. I have a lot more conversations to go and will likely take me a long time but everything else i've tried has not worked. only this.

I updated from 16pro running ios 26 (had the same issue when I updated to ios 26 on this device too)

upgraded to air running ios 26 and was able to find this fix

gabrielben wrote:

Also all the photos & videos from the text messages are all gone, only ones from when my iOS was updated appear now. Not sure what happened

If you're missing photos, I've found that going to Settings > Search > Messages and turning both toggles off, then back on, will usually repopulate the Photos tab.

I had this same issue! I bought an iphone 17 with ios26 and the photos tab and everything was gone - it's been a week and I updated this morning to 26.0.1, it was still annoying me but I just restarted my phone and it's all synced up again and the photos, links, documents etc are back in imessage! yay! fingers crossed it works for everyone else!

If you go to settings , iPhone storage, messages,top conversations, find the same message thread and click on it. I see the photos tab exists thru that view but not thru the messages app. 🤯

for the record I do not use messages in iCloud, everything is on the phone.

Noaaaaaaah wrote:

Could you please tell me what toggles you’re talking about?

Sure. Open the Settings app, then scroll down to the 'Search' option:

Then, scroll down until you find the 'Messages' option and click that. You should see:

Close the Messages app, turn off both toggles, wait a few moments, then turn them back on and reopen Messages.

Hey, I completely understand your frustration. Reading your post felt like reading my own notes — our cases are almost identical at a technical level.

I’ve been troubleshooting this for years across multiple devices and OS cycles. I’ve replicated the issue on every iPhone I’ve owned (I upgrade every launch day), and like you, I’ve gone through every documented and undocumented reset/workaround imaginable. At one point I even bought a second iPhone just so I could run side-by-side tests with fresh installs, different restore paths, and isolated variables.

Here’s the short technical summary:

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• Device → device transfers: No change
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• Fresh iCloud restores: No change
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• Fresh setup with Messages redownload: No change
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• iCloud Messages off/on cycles with multi-day indexing windows: No change
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• Full erase + set up as NEW (no restore): No change
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• Turning off optimize storage: No change
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• Debug logs + sysdiagnose + screen recordings multiple times: Done
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• Different networks (fiber, private, enterprise, 5G): No impact
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• Multiple Apple IDs / test profiles: Same behavior
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• Different storage levels, power states, and network conditions: No effect
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Exact same failure mode every time:

Messages appears to sync, but the local photo/video grid for contacts never fully rebuilds, even though the iCloud corpus contains all media. iPad and Mac pull down the complete library instantly. iPhone never does. It stalls at some arbitrary subset (for me ~10GB visible vs 155GB actual).

This is despite the iPhone staying plugged in overnight, forced indexing periods, manual rebuild attempts, and the usual “leave it plugged in on Wi-Fi and wait” recommendations. In my case:

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• 858,000 messages total
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• 155GB of Messages data
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• iPad + Mac = perfect, complete media grids
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• iPhone = partial, inconsistent, never completes
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• No correlation with remaining device storage, network throughput, or power state
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The worst part is the support cycle. Every time a new senior advisor gets involved, it starts strong for the first week, and they genuinely try. By week three the communication drops off. Engineering repeatedly returns the same response: “Known issue. Sufficient logs captured. Monitor future OS releases.”

And like you, I check Software Update daily because every advisor promises, “It should be addressed in a future release.”

After years of this, and hundreds of hours spent collecting diagnostics for Apple, I can confidently say this is not a user-side configuration issue, nor is it related to corrupted backups or network environments. This is a reproducible sync/indexing bug that only affects iPhone — likely in the photo-grid metadata rebuild process or the Messages daemon responsible for reattaching media locally.

Until Apple addresses it in the OS layer, there’s nothing left for us to try.

I wish I had better news. Your story is my story — down to the hours invested. Hopefully Apple prioritizes this, because for power users with large message histories, this is a core functionality issue.

Same. After updating to 26.0.01 and a reboot all my missing photos in messages are back.