It seems like every time I open the Photos app, more of my photos have been randomly deleted. An entire scuba trip from this past summer 2018 are gone! I am not deleting these photos. But I cannot find them on any device or in iCloud. I have a Time Machine but I cannot figure out how to access my pictures on Time Machine. Why on earth is this happening?! How do I get these back?
This arrangement of devices syncing does not work for photographers with lots of photos that cannot all fit on the iPhone, even when storage is optimized. I cannot be the only photographer having this problem.
That is correct. if you are having a larger library than will fit optimized on your iPhone, you should not use iCloud Photos for this library.
What I am doing is to two separate libraries on my Mac. One large archive library with all my photos. This library is not syncing with iCloud. I copy all photos to this library that I want to save in my archive of photos. This library resides on an external drive and is backed up on a different drive.
To sync new photos from my iPhone to my computers I am using a smaller library. This library is only holding my favorites that I want to see on all my devices. Plus the the most recent photos that I still need to edit. This small library is my iCloud Photos Library and is syncing with all devices. It is small enough, that I do not need the "Optimize Storage" option on my iPhone, since it has 256GB of storage. So I never need to delete photos on my iPhone. I only delete photos on my Mac, where I know, that I have more than one backup.
I appreciate the recommendations. I have one Apple ID. A year ago, when I first noticed photos were disappearing, I received some great help from Apple that revealed I was deleting photos from my phone to make room and then having those changes synced with iCloud. That setup is illogical and annoying, but I just set my phone not so sync with iCloud. Somehow, it seems settings got changed on my phone. So last week, when I plugged in my external hard drive with all my photos and opened iPhoto to do some editing, everything synced again and my photos were eaten straight off my hard drive. So furious.
I'll give the restore from Time Machine a try, but I'm fearful this situation is going to continue. This arrangement of devices syncing does not work for photographers with lots of photos that cannot all fit on the iPhone, even when storage is optimized. I cannot be the only photographer having this problem.
This setup with dual libraries sounds nice. How do I tell iCloud which to sync and which not to sync? And how do you transfer photos between the two? Thanks!
Hi amazon430,
Thank you for using the Apple Support Communities. I saw your post about missing photos, and I'm glad to see how I can help.
There are a number of possibilities in a case like this. You mentioned both iCloud and Time Machine. Are you syncing photos between devices using iCloud Photos? If so, do you have more than one Apple ID?
Do the photos appear on any of your devices that use iCloud Photos?
If you've used more than one Apple ID, a good place to start is to Use iCloud.com from a web browser on a computer. You can sign in there using each Apple ID, and then click Photos to see which content has been synced to iCloud from the Apple ID.
This resource has a few other suggestions that may be helpful: Get help with missing photos
Regarding Time Machine, this link will show you how to Restore a library from Time Machine in Photos on Mac, but I recommend double-checking the above first to rule out possible iCloud/Apple ID factors.
I hope this helps get you started.
Cheers.
Photos Randomly Being Deleted
