Can you recover photos from a dead iPhone?

So, I went to the beach with my iPhone 5s in my pocket. I forgot it was there and I went into the water. Less than 2 minutes I was out. When I noticed it was damaged, I wrapped it in a dry towel. I put it in rice to dry out for 5 days. When I took it out, it wasn't working or turning on. I left it in my drawer in hopes of taking it apart one day and recovering the photos on it. It's been a year since I dropped it in water. Is there a hope of recovering the photos a year later?

If it's truely dead then it's dead. It's the water allowing it it short circuit while it's on that causes the damage, so in most cases drying it out after the fact either works or it doesn't.

Oh, and silica get is many many times better than rice for drying things out.

You may as well attempt to put the phone on charge - don't leave it unattended - and see if it will start up once it's been on charge for a few hours. If not then you would either need to see about getting it assessed for a professional repair or junk it!

If you have to junk it, then unless the photos are backed up to an iCloud account they weill be gone for good, (unless you have a couple of million dollars spare you can pay MOSSAD in order to see if they can recover them!).

The rice thing is a good trick. I've done that one before, but it doesn't always work. Probably water or moisture trapped in the phone. I suggest taking it apart and also removing battery. Let the pieces dry out if you can, also take out sim card to dry as it might have photos or data on it too). It might still charge. If it charges, unplug it an use bluetooth to xfer photos. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you. If you want them that bad, then maybe take it to a cellphone tech.

Only if you manage to get it to power on, or if you had the pics backed up to other services like Photo Stream, Flickr, Google Photos etc, which is likely not the case since its been a year & you course know what you use or don't use.