iPhone 4 photos not appearing in iCloud Gallery

I have 2 old IPhone 4 I am trying to recover the photos from before deactivating, one is listed as a connected device to my Apple account (https://account.apple.com/account/manage/section/devices) the other is not. However, both are linked to my ICloud and can be found when I do "Find Devices" in iCloud (https://www.icloud.com/find/). The photos from both these devices are not in my Icloud Gallery.

Two questions

Why are the 2 devices found in ICloud Find Devices, not listed as connected devices in my apple account?
Why are my photos from these 2 devices not in my iCloud Gallery?

Posted on Sep 27, 2026 3:14 AM

1 reply

Servant of Cats

Level 9 (55,707 points)

Sep 27, 2026 4:10 AM in response to barterphuket

barterphuket wrote:

I have 2 old IPhone 4 I am trying to recover the photos from before deactivating, one is listed as a connected device to my Apple account (https://account.apple.com/account/manage/section/devices) the other is not. However, both are linked to my ICloud and can be found when I do "Find Devices" in iCloud (https://www.icloud.com/find/1. ). The photos from both these devices are not in my Icloud Gallery.

Two questions

Why are the 2 devices found in ICloud Find Devices, not listed as connected devices in my apple account?

2. Why are my photos from these 2 devices not in my iCloud Gallery?

Official Apple Support Community

I just noticed this thread, after replying to the one you started a few minutes later:

iPhone 4 devices keep asking for previous… - Apple Community

As indicated in that thread, the iPhone 4 (GSM), iPhone 4 (CDMA), and iPhone 5s are all too old to meet the current requirements ("iOS 12 or later") for iCloud Photos. Thus, even if iCloud Photos is enabled on those old phones, I'd guess that synchronization with iCloud is not working properly.