Why were my photos deleted without warning?

"They" don't delete photos. What they will do is refuse to provide off-device storage if you exceed your free 5GB and do not pay for more iCloud rental. In that case, once you fill up your iCloud space, nothing more will back up. If you then delete the photos to free up space there won't be a backup.

iCloud storage is for everything, not just photos. 5GB can be enough (it is for me), but in this era where many devices have 128 GB of storage, having 5 GB of backup space doesn't go very far.

Did youforget to pay for your iCloud+ subscription?

Legal - iCloud - Apple

VII. B.

"Apple may at any time, under certain circumstances and without prior notice, immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Account and/or access to the Service. Cause for such termination shall include ... (g) failure to pay any fees owed by you in relation to the Service, provided that in the case of non-material breach, Apple will be permitted to terminate only after giving you 30 days’ notice and only if you have not cured the breach within such 30-day period."

You do see a warning when iCloud is low on storage. It's actually given pretty early on.

You said your photos were deleted without your permission, but if you were not using an upgraded version of iCloud then iCloud wasn't really involved in this. You can store a fair number of photos on a device. It will try to copy them to iCloud too, but if you fill up your free iCloud it will stop copying them. You could possibly store all 1000 photos in 5 GB of iCloud space (I never have more than a dozen on my phone before copying them off).

I suspect that we're missing a lot of background to fully understand what is going on here. It may be these photos never were in Icloud, but you must have done something on your device to cause 1000+ photos to disappear. iCloud is only involved to the extent that they should then have reappeared if you had had sufficient storage space in iCloud.

No. Your photos will not return if you subscribe to iCloud+.

where were the original photos stored? Was the storage low on your phone? Your photos would not be deleted unless you acted upon them and deleted them yourself.

Supplementing muguy’s response:

If you use iCloud Photos and never paid for iCloud+, you were offered 5GB of iCloud storage free of charge. You are warned as you approach maximum use of this space. If you exceeded the 5GB limit, those photos are gone.

iiiiii1111 wrote:

so there is not any way of returning them,any software ?

Nope, they’re gone.

And as I said, you were warned as you passed various thresholds of fullness (I think 75% and/or 80% is one such level - I’m not exactly sure).In your case, perhaps those warnings occurred some time ago.

They said my storage was low and they took away all my photos from the first two years ive had my phone without telling me and i cant get them back ive tried everything and i cant get them back can someone please tell me how to get them back or if there is a possible way

You’re welcome. Enjoy your Apple gear.

Me too. They deleted photos even though I currently have, because of their deletion only 5.38 photo space being used and 198 unused GB overall. I’m furious.

Me too im so disappointed