MyNewIphoneWorld.com

iPhone Camera Not Working? My Solution

Recently, my Apple Iphone’s camera stopped working with an issue that looked like this: when I went to the camera roll to view any picture I’d taken, it appeared that the image had not been saved except for a small gray outline where the picture thumbnail would normally live (I’ve enhanced the gray outline in the thumbnail to the right). When I touched the small gray-outlined box, the program would appear to crash and return to the home position.

But - good news. After a couple of days of attempting to find a solution, victory was mine. For those running into problems with the camera on their iPhone, here’s what I did to fix it.

The Fix

I was running iPhone firmware 1.1.4. I regularly sync the iPhone and noticed the camera stopped working when I upgraded from 1.1.3 to 1.1.4.

At first, I tried to “Restore” to my previous iPhone settings which means I would sync to the settings I had saved earlier in the day. I was dubious that this would work, but I went through with it and waited for the phone to re-copy all the settings including 7 gigabytes of music. As I suspected, it did not work.

My next option involved “Restore”-ing to my October 2007 settings and software. I wasn’t going to do that.. I might as well as “Restore” as a new phone which would have meant a lot of work to get my iPhone back to the state it’s currently in. Bookmarks, contacts, text conversations all would have been lost.

Then, after hunting through many posts on the web and in the Apple Support Discussion on the Apple website, I found this post:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1183455&tstart=0

The response by “jkeegan” was the key:

“One file, which for me was named f1b43d3b3ecf259a3626c13a8b0cebd8ba513117.mdbackup, seemed to talk about image numbers for photos <snip>

So, I disconnected my iPhone from the dock, and then tried deleting that file from the actual Backup directory that iTunes looks at.. I reset the iPhone according to option #2 (Settings->General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings).”

That did the trick.. Delete the file located here:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourcomputer\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\
f1b43d3b3ecf259a3626c13a8b0cebd8ba513117.mdbackup

Then, reset the phone to your last settings. Actually.. just before you re-set but after you delete the file above, try the camera - that might be all you need to do, but I did the re-set anyway.

Hopefully, this will help you fix your camera and avoid resetting the iPhone as a new phone. Good luck.

March 30, 2008 – 7:20 pm