Can I recover deleted photos from older iPhotos backups going back 3 months?

Muttha wrote: I rely on iCloud only for backups.

I'm afraid that iCloud Photos is not a backup service. iCloud Photos is a synchronization system that makes your iPhone, iPad, and Mac have the same pictures, so that when one device changes the others follow. So if you take pictures with your iPhone, they transfer to iCloud.com and are copied to your Mac and iPad, and vice versa.

That also means that, when pictures are deleted from your Mac, they are deleted on every device. That's what makes it synchronized. Unfortunately that means that, after 30 days, the pictures that you had deleted were erased.

Sometimes recovery software will help, because erasing really means just erasing the references to the storage location are erased so the space can be reused. But after a few days most of that space ends up with new data, and recovery becomes more and more sporadic.

This is from Apple's website:

When you turn on iCloud Photos, your photos and videos automatically upload to iCloud. They're not duplicated in your iCloud backup, so you should keep backup copies of your library.

For archiving, I use Time Machine for daily backups to an external drive, and then every month or so I make full copies of the Library to a different external drive.

What operating system are you using? The current version is macOS 13.3 Ventura.

Do you mean you are using the discontinued iPhoto or is it the Photos app?

What do you mean by backup? Are you syncing your devices with iCloud? Do you use Time Machine? or Carbon Copy Cloner? Do you backup to an external drive?

You deleted these pictures from your Mac, right? Are they from your phone? Can you see them on your phone?