Iphone stuck in recovery mode? - 2

So Itunes was prompting me to install an update which I've been putting off so I just went ahead and said ok. It performed to update, but at the end it gave a message about something failing (stupidly, I didn't pay attention to what it said). Now, my phone is stuck in recovery mode and itunes is telling me me to restore. My problem is I don't WANT to restore. I have quite a few photos on my phone that I don't want to lose. Part of my question is, is there a place photos are saved when the iphone syncs regularly? Because I have looked and haven't been able to find them, except the ones I have manually moved to a new folder. I also don't want to lose old text convos or other things. I've already been googling and have tried programs that are supposed to kick it out of recovery but ntohing has worked.

So is there a way to get the iphone out of recovery without restoring?

You need to restore, but you stuff is backed up in itunes.
if your were jailbroke on 5.1.1 you can't update to ios 6, it will brick your iphone.