iPhone 11 photo albums disorganized after restart due to buffering and black screen

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Level 1

4 points

iPhone 11 photo albums disorganized after restart due to buffering and black screen

i had to restart my IPhone 11 recently because it was starting to buffer and show a black screen with a loading icon, And when I turned it back on all of my photos and albums were there, but my albums were empty and all my photos were in “all photos” minus favorited photos.

Has this happened to anyone else? I wondered if it might be a storage space issue since I have a lot of photos and it also wiped my open Safari/Google tabs at the same time (which I also had a lot of).

It’s happened similarly before (although not to this extent) but I was able to just restart again and fix it, but it didn’t work this time.

I wanted to see if anyone else had this happen, find out what it is, and if it can be fixed.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: My phone restarted and disorganized all of my photos from my albums - Any suggestions?

iPhone 11

Posted on Jun 30, 2025 9:43 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 2, 2025 7:20 AM in response to riddles45

I've never had pictures disappearing from albums. It's good the pictures are all still there! But getting them into the right albums is going to be awful!

What do you mean by restart? Are you meaning using the Power Off slider, or a forced restart?

Do you have at least 10% free storage on you phone? Having low remaining storage may cause the phone to be unable to finish an operation, and that might make sense as the cause your empty albums.

Did you have Settings>Apple ID>iCloud Backup turned on? If you don't use iCloud Photos, then you may be able to restore your phone from a backup made just before your trouble. You should look here:

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

This what you do when you buy a new phone, so this backup, if you have it, requires you to erase everything on your phone and replace it with the backup.

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Answer 2

Jul 10, 2025 6:58 AM in response to riddles45

A forced re-start is a good thing to try.

Force restart iPhone - Apple Support

This is different from a simple Power Off. I had to continue holding the button down past the "slide to power off" message, and then I released the button only after the Apple Logo appeared indicating a re-start.

Low storage can even make deleting pictures difficult. A forced re-start might help with storage. If you can relieve the congestion by removing apps or files, that may help you have enough room to move around.

I've gotta say, I find it way more reliable connecting an external drive with my 16 rather than the 12 I had previously-- the USBc port works great.

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Answer 3

riddles45 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 9, 2025 10:27 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

Agreed! I was relieved to see my photos were still there, but it has been tedious sorting them back into the right albums.

Thank you for your suggestions! By “Restart”, I used the power off slider from pressing the volume and power button.

I am not the most technically-familiar with ICloud, so I don’t really use it for a lot. I did not have it on unfortunately. I am also not sure if my backup is up-to-date, as my phone storage has not let my phone do a backup as of recently. But I will look into that suggestion!

I don’t have a lot of storage space available on my phone at the moment (probably 1 - 1 1/2 GB at most) mostly all is taken up by photos.

That would explain why all my photos were disorganized after the restart plus the missing tabs, it’s most likely a storage/nearly full storage issue!

I’ve recently been clearing through my photos and phone and looking into USBs/external storage for important things, so hopefully it’ll be resolved soon.

Thanks for your help!

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