Missing iCloud photos and videos from 2022 on iPhone 6s

oumaima48 wrote:

"Hello, I had around 4000 photos and videos stored in iCloud, but I noticed that many of them were missing. These photos and videos were deleted in 2022.

So you were using iCloud Photos, and deleted many of your 4000 photos?

That was a request to delete them everywhere – not just on the phone, but in iCloud, and on all other devices that were synced to iCloud. They would have gone to the Recently Deleted album to give you a chance to restore them, if you had deleted them by mistake. Once 30 days passed, or you deleted them from that album – whichever came first – they would have been permanently deleted.

2022 is a lot longer than 30 days ago, so they have been permanently deleted. They no longer exist in the current iCloud Photos system, and there is no way to get them back from that system.

Were you syncing photos to your Mac? If so,

• Were you using Time Machine to back up the drive containing your system Photos Library?
• Do you have old clone backups (made with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!) from 2022, from before you did the mass deletion?

Did you ever manually import photos to places on a Mac or PC outside your iCloud Photos library?

If you don't have copies outside the iCloud Photos system, those photos are gone.

There simply would be nowhere to go to get videos/photos, which were deleted in 2022. If you didn't back them up somewhere, safe, like a backup service or your computer, they are gone. iCloud is a syncing service, not an archive. If you sync with iCloud, when you delete a photo/video, it is deleted everywhere at the same time. It does hang out in a recently deleted folder for up to 30 days, but if not restored before 30 days, things are deleted PERMANENTLY.