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why did the photos on my icloud delete, when I deleted them off my phone?

I was freeing up space on my phone, and I checked the icloud to see if my photos were all there.

I saw them there, so went ahead and deleted them all off my phone. Now there is nothing in my icloud photos!


iPhone SE, iOS 13

Posted on Jun 27, 2020 2:18 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 27, 2020 2:22 PM

That is how it is designed to work. You should be able to recover them from Recently Deleted on your phone. See: Get help with missing photos – Apple Support


iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264


Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.


Another way that photos may be on iCloud (if you don’t have iCloud Photos turned on) is via a backup of an iOS device. The only thing you can do with a backup is use it to restore a device or set up a new device. The contents of backups are not viewable at iCloud.com and if you delete a photo from a device it will not be included in future backups and will be lost.


2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 27, 2020 2:22 PM in response to cmxsport

That is how it is designed to work. You should be able to recover them from Recently Deleted on your phone. See: Get help with missing photos – Apple Support


iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264


Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.


Another way that photos may be on iCloud (if you don’t have iCloud Photos turned on) is via a backup of an iOS device. The only thing you can do with a backup is use it to restore a device or set up a new device. The contents of backups are not viewable at iCloud.com and if you delete a photo from a device it will not be included in future backups and will be lost.


why did the photos on my icloud delete, when I deleted them off my phone?

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