hidden archive of photos on iPhone?

The phone isn't "hiding" them anywhere. The entire point of most of their products is to recover deleted content.

When something is deleted, the data isn't actually overwritten. The pointers to where it resides are cleared and the space is marked as available for use.

They don't 'take up memory'. The space they were in is flagged as available .

You're going to have to work with them on exactly where they located them and how.

It's possible that they were in text messages and you just haven't scrolled back far enough to see them.

Dannymac22 wrote:

OK, this is really bizarre. I'm testing out some iMessage archiving software - Decipher TextMessage. I ask it to do a "backup" of my iPhone SE (iOS 26.1), and it pulls off my messages responsibly. But it ALSO pulls off a hundred or so jpeg photos that are NOT in my photo library or albums on my phone. For that matter, they aren't even in my iCloud account, though that app shouldn't have access to that anyway. These are iPhone photos that I deleted long ago. Where in the world is it finding these old photos on my iPhone????

ask them https://deciphertools.com/support.html not an Apple product.

Dannymac22 wrote:

I'm asking abuot WHERE if anywhere, the iPhone is hiding old photos.

Yea and you're using a 3rd party app, that has nothing to do with Apple.

What issue do you have asking the app developer where they find the info from?