I am not sure what I did but my photos are no longer on my phone. I tried to restore recently deleted photos but there are none showing in this file. Help
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Photos missing on my iphone. I tried to removed duplicate to reduce amount of storage needed and all my albums are gone. What to do??
iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 18
From your original title, I wonder if you thought that seeing a picture in two albums meant there were really two pictures, so you permanently deleted one? It turns out that an Album is just a list of pictures to be seen together, just like a playlist of songs, so one picture can be on several lists-- but it's exactly the same picture. You can remove a picture from an album, keeping it in the Library-- but permanently trashing a picture removes it from the Library and from all albums.
You can see this:
If you're missing photos or videos in the Photos app - Apple Support
Basically the above says to look in Recently Deleted and in Hidden. Be sure to check your Library thoroughly-- the pictures may not be where you expect, as dates may have changed. You can use the search field with the date or location. And remember, you can sort the Library by date captured or by date added. Also, your Library view now has filters, and you may not have your filter set to "All Items:"
If you use iCloud Photos, you can look at Photos in iCloud.com. But they've probably already been deleted there, unless you're very fast.
If you don't use iCloud Photos, but you have Settings>Apple ID>iCloud Backup turned on, then you may be able to recover data from the last 30 days or so at iCloud.com, but you would need to look at the date of the backup to be sure it's from before you lost the images. You should look here:
View and manage iCloud device backups - Apple Support
This requires you to erase everything on your phone and replace it with the backup.
If you don't keep your own backups on an external drive, then there really isn't any place else to look.
From your original title, I wonder if you thought that seeing a picture in two albums meant there were really two pictures, so you permanently deleted one? It turns out that an Album is just a list of pictures to be seen together, just like a playlist of songs, so one picture can be on several lists-- but it's exactly the same picture. You can remove a picture from an album, keeping it in the Library-- but permanently trashing a picture removes it from the Library and from all albums.
You can see this:
If you're missing photos or videos in the Photos app - Apple Support
Basically the above says to look in Recently Deleted and in Hidden. Be sure to check your Library thoroughly-- the pictures may not be where you expect, as dates may have changed. You can use the search field with the date or location. And remember, you can sort the Library by date captured or by date added. Also, your Library view now has filters, and you may not have your filter set to "All Items:"
If you use iCloud Photos, you can look at Photos in iCloud.com. But they've probably already been deleted there, unless you're very fast.
If you don't use iCloud Photos, but you have Settings>Apple ID>iCloud Backup turned on, then you may be able to recover data from the last 30 days or so at iCloud.com, but you would need to look at the date of the backup to be sure it's from before you lost the images. You should look here:
View and manage iCloud device backups - Apple Support
This requires you to erase everything on your phone and replace it with the backup.
If you don't keep your own backups on an external drive, then there really isn't any place else to look.
How to recover missing photos after removing duplicates on iPhone?
