Panic is the main enemy here, because often the phone is simply "sleeping" too deeply, and the data is sitting quite safely in the storage. The first thing to do is rule out a simple flat battery. Connect the device to an original or known-good cable and leave it alone for about twenty minutes. The glowing apple may not appear straight away, and that is normal: with a deeply discharged battery, the power controller first builds up a minimum charge.
If there is still no reaction after half an hour, we try a forced restart. On the iPhone 14 Plus it is done like this: a short press of the volume up button, then a short press of volume down, and then hold the side button. You need to hold it for a long time, ten to fifteen seconds, until the logo appears on the screen. This will not erase a single photo — it is simply a hard reset of a frozen process, like racking the slide on a jammed mechanism.
Now the main question that troubles everyone: are the pictures alive? If you had automatic backup to iCloud turned on, most likely yes. You can check this right now from any other device, without even turning the phone on. Go to iCloud.com under your Apple ID and look at the "Photos" section. Seen the latest shots from the beach? Breathe out, the copy is intact. Don't remember whether backup was on? That is the first thing worth checking while the phone shows no signs of life.
The bad news begins when there is no backup and the phone responds neither to charging nor to a restart. Here we are already talking about a deeper problem — perhaps a flex cable has come loose, the board has been damaged after a drop, or moisture has done its dark work. Taking the case apart yourself and poking a screwdriver at the battery in the hope that "it might come back to life" is the worst of ideas. That is how the chance of recovering photos from the memory turns into zero.
The good news: the memory in an iPhone is not soldered irrevocably to the fate of the motherboard. Even if the phone does not turn on, a specialist with soldering equipment can remove the storage chip, read it with a programmer and extract the files. But for that, no one must have tried before that to open the device with a knife or connect it to a dubious charger.
So the procedure is simple: first the cable and waiting, then a hard reset, then a visit to the technician. And that is where the routine begins, which you can safely shift onto someone else's shoulders. When the technician in matte armour takes your iPhone 14 Plus in gloves and connects it to diagnostics, he is not thinking about "what junk is inside", but about how to get out of there your sunsets, family dinners and the cat that lies funny on the keyboard. If the photos can physically be recovered, they will be. After that, all that remains is to set up backup, so that next time you know: whatever happens to the phone at the airport, your pictures are already sitting quietly in the cloud.