Back into the Valley of the Shiny...

So back to the Apple Store to a) complain about the stupid and wrong advice I got yesterday and b) try and find out if there's a way to fix the problem I now have without having to manual recreate the photo album structure I have on the phone.  What I have now seems to be in a weird Apple format that only works in the Backups and not as something I can copy to a clean device without using the corrupted backup.

Next up, I'll be using Dropbox for my photos and cut back to the basic level of Apple iCloud.

My last iPhone post

Basically, the problem stems from what is almost certainly a corrupted backup file carried over from an earlier phone.  There's a process that just won't quit and they can't really work it out.  So the only option is to do a complete Factory Reset and then install everything onto the clean install.

The problem I have is that I had, erroneously, assumed that the photos were backed up to iCloud as something useful.  Instead, the photos are backed up as a block of data that can only be read by unpacking the image onto an iPhone.  Essentially meaning that if something happens to your image, you lose the content too.

What I'm doing first is enabling Dropbox and using that for the photo sync moving forward.  After that, I'm going to copy all the images over to my laptop via USB.

I can then do the Factory Reset and start the process of rebuilding the phone from scratch and finally copying the images over to the phone via iTunes from the laptop, and then I can delete them from the laptop.

I'll then set up a fresh backup on iCloud but exclude the images which I'll keep on Dropbox moving forward.