What happens to your hike photos and videos when you switch to a new iPhone?

The short answer

A standard iPhone-to-iPhone transfer, whether by Quick Start, an iCloud backup restore, or a wired transfer in Finder, copies installed apps and most of their data, including files an app keeps in its own private storage. In practice this covers a route history recorded and stored on the device reasonably well, because it comes along as part of the app's data during the restore.

Where it gets less certain is anything that depends on a separate step you may not have taken: signing into a cloud account inside the app itself. A route history backed up that way does not depend on the transfer going right, because it was never only living on the old phone to begin with — it is sitting on a server, waiting for the new phone to sign in and ask for it.

Three different systems, doing three different things

The device backup

An iCloud backup or a Finder backup is a snapshot of the phone as a whole — settings, app data, the works. Restoring one onto a new iPhone is the closest thing to cloning the old device, and it is what makes a new phone feel identical to the old one within minutes of finishing setup.

iCloud Photos

This is a separate system that syncs the Photos app library specifically, independent of any device backup. If it was turned on before the switch, photos and videos taken with the Camera app show up on the new phone as soon as it finishes downloading them, regardless of which restore method was used.

An app's own cloud account

Anything an app stores outside the Photos library — a route with photos, clips and voice notes pinned to specific points along it, for example — is not covered by iCloud Photos at all, because none of that ever lived in the Photos app to begin with. Whether it survives a phone switch depends entirely on whether that individual app has its own sign-in and cloud sync, and whether you turned it on.

Why "my photos are backed up" is not the same claim

It is an easy assumption to make, and a reasonable one, because iCloud Photos genuinely does cover everything shot with the regular Camera app. The gap is that a photo captured from inside a recording app, pinned to a specific point on a route, is not automatically the same file living in the same place. Depending on how that app is built, the picture might also be saved to the system Photos library, or it might live only inside the app's own data — in which case iCloud Photos was never going to help it survive anything.

A voice note pinned to a route is an even clearer case: there is no system-level "Voice Notes" library with its own iCloud sync the way there is for photos. Whatever keeps it safe has to be the app that recorded it in the first place.

What actually breaks if you skip the step

A device restore that goes well and an app with no cloud account of its own can still combine into a real gap. If the old phone is wiped, traded in, or simply retired to a drawer before its data made it into any backup, whatever was sitting only in that one app's local storage goes with it — a device backup only protects what existed at the moment it was taken, and a restore only recovers what the backup captured.

The failure mode is usually quiet rather than dramatic: nothing looks broken on setup day, because the app itself reinstalls and opens fine. It is weeks or months later, looking for a specific route from a specific trip, that the gap becomes visible.

What TrailCam does

TrailCam lets you sign in with Apple or with an email address, and once you have, routes sync to the cloud on their own — the same history that includes the photos, clips and voice notes pinned along each one. Signing in on a new phone is what actually matters here, more than which transfer method got you there; a new or freed-up phone starts with the whole history already in place because it was never only sitting on the old one. It is free to download.