How to recover accidentally overwritten photo file on iCloud files drive?

Fair enough. This seems like an incompetent design to me. Apple's engineers, or what they are allowed to do, is substandard. I clicked on the photo, got confused, clicked done, and my precious photo was destroyed. Now what I'm getting is it's my fault?

I didn't intentionally edit the file. I viewed it. By the "intended" means". As in I touched the filename to look at it. Apple makes it difficult or impossible to add such photos to your library anyway, but I wanted it in icloud files.

Then the "viewer" started editing the photo through some combination of touches/swipes. Then I clicked "done" just wanting it all to go away not understanding that in phonespeak/applespeak "done" means "save" not "done".

Seems like victim-blaming here when there should simply be some user accessible file history to icloud drive, obviously.

I feel like you aren't listening. I don't have an option to "use photos app". I wasn't trying to edit the file. It's a file on my drive that I wanted to view. I didn't want it in my photo library and it's a pain to put in there anyway.

The reason lesson is that if Apple will cut a corner on software, it will. Almost every element of both iOS and macOS is lacking obvious features, probably to avoid "confusing" users with too many options. Compare Finder to File Explorer on Windows.

Another lesson is that people in forums will blame the victim or imply they are dumb or did something wrong, rather than acknowledge that the software has a defect (that "done" means overwrite your file and that there is no way to undo it or prompt to save before overwriting your file).

Also, muguy, if it is not "offline storage" (you just made this up out of thin air) why do you pay for space and have a certain "GB available"??? It patently IS storage, it does ABSOLUTELY NOT just synchronize your files or there would be no limit on the size you can STORE OFFLINE.

I think they have changed the behavior of the image viewer for iCloud files, probably due to exactly this issue - now it saves the image to a "copy" file. Thank you Apple, this is the first time I feel like someone is out there listening to this kind of problem.

[Edited by Moderator]

muguy wrote:

The image viewer makes no changes to your file. But if you edit it, you’ll make changes.

The image viewer includes an editor. It will definitely make changes. It used to overwrite your file. Now it saves it to a "copy". Thanks guys.

LD150 wrote:

OK some quick actions create a copy (remove background) some don't (rotate, markup)

Man this forum software is all messed up. It keeps putting comments all out of order. This is getting frustrating.

Maybe they haven't fixed it then, and some "quick actions" (trigged by who knows what gestures) will still overwrite your file when you click "done" and AFAIK there is no option to do anything but click "done" once it has started happening.

LD150 wrote:

or do you mean quick actions?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/2b393ac6-c823-4a75-951c-bd20ae0b7bf0

I would appreciate it if you made only one reply at a time rather than a string of them, because something is very wrong with how this forum software is ordering the replies.

I don't know if it is called quick actions. I am not bringing up any menu. Certain gestures will trigger an edit to the file, accidentally so, because they can happen when you are panning and zooming in the image with gestures. And once that happens there is no choice but to say "done" that I can tell. Last December it overwrote my file irrevocably. This year when it happened, it saved it to a copy.

muguy wrote:

it remains that the viewer will not edit your images. One can pan, zoom, etc. selecting “done” closes the file with no changes. Pinch to close, closes the file with no changes. The only changes that modify are those made using the markup tool.

That is false. The viewer in files will edit images given certain gestures which can happen when one is trying to pan and zoom. I don't understand the determination here to deny the problem.