I Deleted Photos From IOS Album and Now They Are Gone for Good?
I love a good scavenger hunt – not when the search targets are “photos that I wanted to keep forever on my device, but now I can’t find”. While your phone should be pretty smart about what happens when you delete photos from folders or delete folders or packages of photos, sometimes the whole process can be a little confusing.
And when your photos disappear, even if you didn’t want to make them disappear, the fun begins. This week in the section of questions and answers on the Tech 911 I let Lifehacker reader Stuart explained:
Q: Where did the photos of my iPad go?
My wife had 2 albums with the same photos on her ipad, today she deleted the photos in one album and deleted the contents of both albums! We looked at recently deleted photos, but they are not there either. Any suggestions please?
A: Not all is (hopefully) lost
Here’s the good news. I don’t believe your photos are gone forever. In fact, I can’t think of a way where deleting photos, albums or photos in albums would immediately delete them from your device permanently.
Windows users like me know this fear – thanks to the old Shift + Delete hotkey, which some of us use recklessly, we sometimes do find ourselves accidentally deleting something permanently (oops). On the other hand, your “recently deleted” iOS folder is both your trash can and your savior.
However, to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass, I did exactly what you described in your prompt. I took some pictures, created two folders in Photos, and copied all four into one, and two of the four into the other. When I tried to delete two images in the second folder, I was prompted for the following:
Click Remove from Album and that’s all that happens; they will remain in your Camera Roll and only disappear from the album from which they were deleted. If you click on “Delete”, as you could, the images disappear from that folder and any other folder you placed them in and from the Camera Roll altogether. However, they still haven’t gone forever. Not really.
When I opened the Recently Deleted folder, which is in Photos> Albums, if you scroll to the very bottom, then, uh, the recently deleted images were indeed still there. I’m going to assume that there is a very simple answer to your problem, and that is how Apple presents deleted images.
When you first open this folder, you will see all of your recently deleted images – in the last 30-40 days – with the oldest images at the very bottom, because they have the shortest time between now and their expiration. On my iPhone, my recently deleted folder looked like this when I downloaded it after deleting these two photos:
However, scrolling to the top of the Recently Deleted section revealed the images just deleted, ready to be recovered with a few finger taps.
This is my explanation of why you might have missed your ill-fated photos. I am not aware of any mechanism that could simply cause them to disappear after being removed from the folder. My only other thought is if you are browsing a shared folder and the folder creator deleted the images in it, they would indeed disappear from both your camera and your recently deleted folder. They will still appear in either the Camera Roll or Recently Deleted folder on the creator’s device, so they are not lost forever in this scenario.
Check iCloud to see if your missing photos have been saved there – in your Camera Roll and in the Recently Deleted folder. If this still doesn’t show your images – and you haven’t backed them up to your computer or to a separate cloud service (like Google Photos) – you can try turning on a device that you haven’t used for several days (or weeks). … If it was set to sync with iClouD, they’ll still be there. Save them elsewhere and send them to yourself.
Assuming none of these options work, restoring your iPad from a recent backup should also undo any changes you made that made your photos stop working. Be sure to save any content you’ve created during this time – other photos, notes, and so on – as they will disappear when you go back to your old backup.