Hi, my dad upgraded his cloud storage, but it says if he backs up photos onto the iCloud he will lose about 5,000 photos. It is a notification message from the iPhone, not a text message or anything, so it should be legitimate. Is this a matter of still not enough storage or something else?
It sounds more like a message received if he is enabling iCloud Photos and previously used sync through the computer. Is that the case? A device backup includes photos unless those are synced to iCloud.
"iPhone warns of losing photos when backing up to iCloud: Hi, my dad upgraded his cloud storage, but it says if he backs up photos onto the iCloud he will lose about 5,000 photos. It is a notification message from the iPhone, not a text message or anything, so it should be legitimate. Is this a matter of still not enough storage or something else?"
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Losing Photos if Upgrading iCloud:
Upgrading your iCloud storage does not result in loss of photos; however, if you delete photos from your device, they will also be removed from iCloud. So, to avoid losing photos, export these photos to a backup, to ensure noting is lost. Go Here: Set Up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support
Critically Important:
Export these:
Back up these Photos from your iPhone by exporting them.
Go here: Transfer photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC - Apple Support
If muguy is right, then this warning is correct, and you may lose those pictures. Some pictures transferred from a computer can be viewed in Photos, but they can't be modified by Photos, so there may be some operations that produce a warning about those being at risk. You can tell if a picture is not in control of Photos by turning going to Edit mode-- these pictures can't be edited by Photos.
You may be able to transfer these picture files to a computer using the methods in the links provided by The Littles, but I'm not sure which of these work or don't on these types of pictures.
One way to preserve these orphan images is to save them to the Files app (Share>Save to Files,) and then in Files, use More(•••)>Select>[select some]>Done>Share>Save Image. This puts the file back into Photos in a way that can be controlled by the app. It also leaves, now, 3 copies of each picture, which will take up a lot of space. So you may have to deal with a small number at a time, delete the extras, and go again.
Is this what's going on with these 5000 pictures?
iPhone warns of losing photos when backing up to iCloud
