Solution: iPhone 4 Cameras not functioning (Both: Front and Rear)

Hey everyone. I just wanted to document my experience with my iPhone 4’s cameras slowly beginning to not function, and how I fixed it. EDIT: Sorry about the formatting with everything on a new line :(

Effects I was noticing:

“Camera” is Camera.app, the default camera app on the iPhone 4 (currently using iOS 5.1.1)

“Camera+” is the App Store app by “tap tap tap”.

- Camera’s shutter would not open

- When switching to the front camera, Camera would freeze.

- When reopening Camera, it would typically be a black screen

- Camera+ would operate, but would just have a black screen, even when switching to the front camera

- Switching to video mode resulted in the same (either black screen, or shutter not opening)

- Camera would sometimes freeze after taking a picture making me miss the shot (beyond annoying!)

First off the fix:

--> Clean the “Camera Capacitor” with rubbing alcohol (on damp on a paper towel – probably better on a microfiber glasses cleaning cloth though)

To locate the camera capacitor, look at this image here:

http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/mXXSH...

It is the very small little bump located right above the yellow cable: on the right side of it.

The yellow cable is the “Headphone jack/volume button cable (pry from top)” –

(iPhone 4 Logic Board Replacement)

For cleaning it, it helps to disconnect this headphone jack cable (and possibly the LCD and Digitizer ones as well)

The idea essentially came from here:

“After replacing screen camera app now stuck on shutter?”

After replacing screen camera app now stuck on shutter?

and here:

“iPhone 4 camera faulty flickering SOLVED!”

iPhone 4 camera faulty flickering SOLVED!!

Both of these posts talk about using a circuit writer pen to reestablish the connection, but indeed mine was intact. I also worried about doing this, as I have destroyed an iPhone before by trying to solder back in a battery connection terminal (took the pads right off).

I noticed my Camera Capacitor had like a piece of dust on it or something, so I was hopeful.

Sure enough, cleaning it worked!

Other attempts, but they did not work:

It started with the front camera first, and typically “progressed” to the rear camera not working.

- Tried other cameras (including the notorious Camera+ app)

- Reboots and Resprings (My device was jailbroken, so I thought that may have been some of the problem) would not work.

- Booting into Module Substrate’s Safe Mode

- Booting into Mobile Substrate’s Disabled mode (via Vol Up during reboot)

- Upgrading from iOS 5.0.1 to iOS 5.1.1 (I thought maybe it was a bug fix, because of some things I was seeing in syslog when debugging the issue). Although I did do a restore from iTunes though, and not a new setup.

- In an attempt to do a “new-like setup”, I did some internal file surgery (ie, deleting files that will be recreated after restarting the Photos.app) to have it reconstruct the photo cache (It reconstructs when closing and reopening Photos.app)

This is good info for rebuilding the Photo cache, but it as well did NOT fix the issue:

In iFunBox, go to: /var/mobile/Media/PhotoData

Deleted the folders: Metadata, Thumbnails, MISC

Deleted all files in this folder (such as Photos.sqlite)

Then reboot the iPhone and start the Photos.app again