But it gets worse, as the reporters detail in a new Wall Street Journal article<\/a> (paywalled) and video<\/a>. By enabling a recovery key, the thief disables Apple\u2019s normal account recovery process for resetting the Apple ID password. In other words, if this were to happen to you, along with all the financial losses and headaches, you would lose access to your iCloud account, possibly forever, and with it, all your photos in iCloud. With luck, Apple will block this attack soon.<\/p>\n For now, follow this commonsense advice to reduce the chances of being victimized:<\/p>\n As with so many other modern ills, good backups go a long way toward minimizing the pain of problems. They won\u2019t prevent someone from stealing your iPhone or locking you out of your account, but if that were to happen, at least you won\u2019t lose all your photos!<\/p>\n There are two possible backup scenarios. Using iCloud Photos and downloading originals to your Mac is easiest but requires that you pay Apple for more storage if you have more than a handful of photos. If you don\u2019t use iCloud Photos, you can just back up your iPhone to your Mac or, better yet, import images into Photos on the Mac and then sync them back. It\u2019s more work and fussier, but doesn\u2019t cost anything.<\/p>\n Either way, once the photos are on your Mac, you should back up all your data using Time Machine, an Internet service like Backblaze<\/a>, or a third-party app like Carbon Copy Cloner<\/a> or SuperDuper<\/a>. If you\u2019re concerned about the quality of your backups for preserving photos, contact us for advice.<\/p>\n (Featured image by iStock.com\/metamorworks)<\/p>\n Social Media: With new reports of iPhone theft victims being locked out of their iCloud accounts, it\u2019s all the more important that you copy your iPhone photos to a Mac and then back up that Mac.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If your iPhone were to be stolen or suffer an unfortunate accident, would you lose all your precious photos? Those using iCloud Photos are probably shaking their heads smugly, thinking that all those baby and vacation photos are backed up securely in iCloud. iCloud Photos does indeed store a copy of all your photos, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,69,106,186,8,25,112,185,384,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-apple","category-apple-consulting-ct","category-apple-support-ct","category-backup","category-iphone","category-mac","category-mac-support-ct","category-mactech","category-photos","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8619,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8609\/revisions\/8619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Backing Up Your iPhone Photos<\/h3>\n
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\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macworks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/make-sure-to-back-up-iphone-photos-on-your-mac.png\")
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\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macworks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/make-sure-to-back-up-iphone-photos-on-your-mac-1.png\")
\nThen you can sync all the photos (or just desired ones, if your iPhone is low on space) back to your iPhone using the Finder. First, select the iPhone in a Finder window\u2019s sidebar. Then click Photos in the button bar at the top, and select \u201cSync photos to your device from Photos\u201d along with \u201cAll photos and albums\u201d and \u201cInclude videos\u201d in the options below. Finally, click Apply or Sync.
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/macworks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/make-sure-to-back-up-iphone-photos-on-your-mac-2.png\")
\nTechnically speaking, backing up your iPhone to your Mac without syncing to Photos also backs up your photos, but the only way to get them back is to restore a backup onto an iPhone. It\u2019s much better to have all the photos accessible in Photos too.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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