Photos Lost on Old iPad after disabling iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive

Hi, recently I found my old iPad from a couple years ago. The version is a 5th generation. After charging it and restarting it to fix its glitches, I went to go check the photos and saw 400+ photos on it that weren’t on my current iPad. I was happy to find these, but wanted it to not sync my other photos that I had already onto the old device.


Mistakenly, I turned off iCloud Drive, kept Optimize iPad Storage, and also turned off the iCloud Photos. After doing this, I saw that it started to delete most of them and left only the ones that I already had synced on iCloud. This made me confused and frustrated. I already looked through iCloud, and those photos that disappeared weren’t there. I already checked my “Recently Deleted” and other steps to see if I could recover them, but all I found was nothing.


Is it possible to recover them somehow? Were the photos not synced before I did what I did? I would like to know since if I can’t do anything about this, then it’s a shame I didn’t properly educate myself before losing some old data I wanted to have.

Posted on Dec 15, 2025 3:11 PM

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2 replies

Jan 5, 2026 10:11 PM in response to ST4RNID

Re: Photos Lost on Old iPad after disabling iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive


Commiserations on the lost photos.

Seems those Photos must have already been synced to iCloud, if they were deleted,

Adding, editing, or deleting an item in sync adds, edits, or deletes it everywhere it is in sync.


Turning off sync of iCloud Photos should leave those on iPad safely stored there.

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Re: "I already checked my “Recently Deleted” and other steps to see if I could recover them, but all I found was nothing".


Wondering where you checked ...

Eg: check the "Recently Deleted" album in the Photos app on the old iPad

check for "Recently deleted" on iCloud.


Apple Support have an article online to help with "missing" photos.

Eg: You may be able to recover photos from the "Recently Deleted" folder for up to 30 days:

If you're missing photos or videos in the Photos app - Apple Support

or

Get help with iCloud Photos - Apple Support


If you weren't able to recover your photos:

You might want to reach out to the Photos Support Team (eg: for helpful advice).

There is a "Get Support" link (at the very bottom), on the Photos Support website (link below)

Photos - Official Apple Support

Jan 6, 2026 7:31 AM in response to ST4RNID

Turning off iCloud on an Optimized device generates this warning:

What's happening is that the pictures aren't fully there when a device is Optimized-- it just keeps lower resolution screen sized images-- the full pictures are kept at iCloud. So you didn't actually lose any original picture files, since originals aren't deleted. As brbo said, if the originals still exist, then they should still be at iCloud.com


Is it possible that this iPad was connected to a different Apple account?

Photos Lost on Old iPad after disabling iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive

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