My LINE photos are gone after switching phones. What can I do?

By Hank Wang, developer of LAILOLA · Updated October 12, 2026

Short answer: if your Mac still has a backup of your old iPhone made before you switched, those photos may be inside it and can be found on your Mac. If the old phone was never backed up to a Mac, or only to iCloud, LAILOLA can't help.

Step 1: Look for the old phone's backup on your Mac

Open Finder, select any connected iPhone (the new one is fine), and click Manage Backups.
The list shows every iPhone backup on this Mac, with device name and date. Look for the old phone, dated before the switch.
You can also open the folder directly: in Finder press ⌘⇧G and enter ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/.

Step 2: Copy that backup before anything else

Control-click it in Manage Backups, choose Show in Finder, and copy the whole folder to an external drive or another location. It's your only "before the switch" snapshot — protect it first.

Step 3: See what's still in it

An iPhone backup is made for restoring a whole phone; opening the folder shows thousands of files with coded names. LAILOLA is a Mac app that reads this kind of backup. Choose the backup, and it scans it on your Mac and tells you how many messages, photos and files are still there. The photo wall is arranged by year, and when the backup holds the text that appears in photos, you can also find those photos by their words (like a sign or a screenshot). Scanning and browsing are free.

Found them? Keep them

When you're sure, a one-time LAILOLA Pro purchase saves originals that are in the backup, saves attachments to a folder you choose, and exports chats as TXT or PDF. Photos that were only ever kept as thumbnails are clearly labeled as thumbnails.

When won't this work?

The old phone was never backed up to this Mac (an iCloud-only backup counts as "never" here).
The old phone's backup is encrypted: LAILOLA can't read encrypted backups at this time.
The photos were already gone from the old phone before the backup was made.
Contact profile pictures aren't in iPhone backups, so LAILOLA shows initials.

Before your next phone change

Open important photos and files on the phone and save them to Photos or the Files app.
Check your Mac's free space: a full backup is roughly the size of the phone's used storage.
While the old phone is still in your hands, make a full local backup in Finder (leave "Encrypt local backup" unchecked). Once the phone is traded in or given away, you can't.

For moving your chats to a new phone, follow LINE's official instructions. This page is about keeping an extra copy on your own computer.