I'm upgrading to a new iPhone — how do I keep my photos?

The rule that matters most

Never uninstall or reinstall the app as part of an upgrade, and never clear its data — your photos live on the device. And never wipe, trade in or sell the old iPhone until you have personally seen your photos in the app on the new one.

What carries your photos

Buildsnapper stores photos in its app documents on the phone. Apple's standard transfer mechanisms all include app documents, so any of these works:

• Direct device-to-device transfer during new-iPhone setup (the "Quick Start" flow where the phones sit next to each other)
• Restoring the new phone from an iCloud backup of the old one
• Restoring from a computer backup (Finder on a Mac, iTunes/Apple Devices on Windows)

What does not work: setting the new iPhone up as a brand-new device and downloading Buildsnapper from the App Store. That gives you a fresh, empty app — signing in restores your project lists from the cloud, but not the photo files. If you have already done this, stop: the old phone still has everything, as long as it has not been wiped.

The safe sequence

1. Before anything else, make sure the old phone has a current backup (Settings → your name → iCloud → iCloud Backup → Back Up Now), or plan to use the direct transfer during setup.
2. Set up the new iPhone using the transfer or the backup — when it asks "Transfer your apps and data", choose from the old iPhone or from the backup, never "Set up as new".
3. Let the transfer finish completely, including the app downloads that continue in the background afterwards.
4. Open Buildsnapper on the new phone and sign in.
5. Verify. Open your projects, open the plots with unsent photos, and check the photo thumbnails are actually showing. Open a few full-screen. This is the step people skip.
6. Only when you have seen the photos on the new phone: wipe, trade in or sell the old one.

Extra safety nets

• If iCloud Photos is on, the full-resolution, location-tagged gallery copies of your captured photos are also in your Photos library — they follow your Apple ID to the new phone independently of the app.
• Reports you have already sent are not at risk in a phone move: the PDF and photo archive were stored when you sent them, and nothing on the phone affects them.

If something looks wrong after the move

If a plot shows missing images on the new phone, do not delete anything, do not reinstall the app, and above all do not wipe the old phone. Contact support — choosing "Evidence at risk on site" if a deadline is close — with the old phone intact, everything is recoverable.