Recovering deleted photos

A great safety feature on the iPhone is that deleted pictures remain in the "Recently Deleted" view for 30 days before they are removed permanently. This safety feature can be defeated, though, by choosing to prematurely delete pictures from the "Recently Deleted" view.  If you use iCloud Photos, then that "synchronizes" its Photos Library with the phone, so what you see on the phone is what is at iCloud. iCloud Photos doesn't keep pictures in "Recently Deleted" any longer than the phone does.

Unfortunately, there is no additional safety feature in case we don't heed the warning for the first safety.

You can see this:

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

Basically the above says to look in Recently Deleted and in Hidden. Be sure to check your Library thoroughly. You can use the search field with the date or location—the pictures may not be where you expect, as dates may have changed. 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 don't use iCloud Photos, but you have Settings>Apple ID>iCloud Backup turned on, then you may be able to recover data. You should look here:

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support 

“Restore” is what you do when you buy a new phone, so this safety, if you have it set, requires you to erase everything on your phone and replace it with the backup. You would have to get to the backup quickly, usually within a day, before the backup is replaced by a newer one. However, if you did have iCloud Photos enabled, then the iCloud Backup wouldn't make an extra copy.

Unfortunately, if you don't keep your own backups to an external drive, then there really isn't any place else to look. To back up your pictures you can just plug in an external drive, select the pictures, and use Share>Save to Files. Alternatively, you can backup to a computer:

Transfer photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC

If you haven't done one of those backups, then your remaining pictures continue to be in peril. 

Your right, Richard, Recently Deleted is the only safety line offered by Photos, but I would not call it a "great feature". It is broken by design, because it is combining the place where deleted items are saved for recovery with the place where we erase them permanently. This is causing two major issues:

• We have to empty Recently Deleted before the 30 days are up, if we need to free storage on or device immediately, and then there will be no safety copy, not even in iCloud.
• We cannot let the Recently Deleted album become so full and cluttered up, that it is difficult to check, if we accidentally deleted an important photo. We need to keep Recently Deleted nearly empty, so we can see instantly what we just trashed and recover accidentally deleted item.

Some other Apple apps are separating the deletion process from the recovery process, for example the Calendar. If we accidentally deleted an entry, we can restore a previous version of the Calendar on iCloud.

Other apps allow to delete items from the device, but we can recover them on iCloud for thirty days: Recover deleted files on iCloud.com – Apple Support (UK)

Indeed, the Trash in the Finder is similar, But on the Mac we are having Time Machinate to recover deleted Finder items from a recent backup. On the iPhone is no easy way to recover permanently deleted photos, if we are using iCloud Photos. The iCloud backup of the iPhone or iPad does not include the photos.

léonie wrote:

Indeed, the Trash in the Finder is similar, But on the Mac we are having Time Machinate to recover deleted Finder items from a recent backup. On the iPhone is no easy way to recover permanently deleted photos, if we are using iCloud Photos. The iCloud backup of the iPhone or iPad does not include the photos.

Even if you have iCloud Photos turned off,

• You might have things set up to exclude photos from iCloud backups.
• There is no way to restore photos from a backup without potentially wiping a bunch of unrelated changes to other things that you have made since the last backup.
• There is likely to be only a fairly short window – a day or less – before a backup that has accidentally-deleted photos gets overwritten by a new backup in which those photos simply do not exist.

An iCloud backup is better than having no backup at all, and it is automatic, so we cannot forget to make it. It helps if our device is lost or stole or damaged and ewe need to migrate the data to a replacement device or the iPhone had to be reset to the factory settings.

But you are right, it is hard to recover selected data and documents from the iCloud backup. As you wrote - we cannot restore items selectively, like from a Time Machine backup, and we and there I no long history. if we detect a problem, that happened a long time ago, it is too late.

We need iCloud backups that are like Time Machine backups, where we can go back in time and recover long lost items selectively.

Richard.Taylor wrote:

I wanted was to empty the trash from an external drive without changing the internal trash. I was told that this couldn't be done, and that I was an idiot (implied if not explicit) for wanting to do that. Several times. The Trash was not meant to hold files--the TrashCan should be kept empty. I'm not sure when I found out that "option-command-delete" would erase selected files from Trash. I know that I only recently discovered that we can "use groups" to separate trash files by location, and that I can now erase the trash in an external drive without bothering other drives.

LOL and thanks for the tip. I always want to have an empty (digital) trash ... so much that I sometimes via muscle memory empty it, and after a few seconds have a Doh! moment, and then either have to laboriously re-create some document or retrieve it from the Carbon Copy Cloner backup.

léonie wrote: …Recently Deleted … is combining the place where deleted items are saved for recovery with the place where we erase them permanently.

The TrashCan is similar. Many years ago, maybe my first experience with this forum, I asked how to erase some files in Trash but not others (this was MANY years ago.) I think what I wanted was to empty the trash from an external drive without changing the internal trash. I was told that this couldn't be done, and that I was an idiot (implied if not explicit) for wanting to do that. Several times. The Trash was not meant to hold files--the TrashCan should be kept empty. I'm not sure when I found out that "option-command-delete" would erase selected files from Trash. I know that I only recently discovered that we can "use groups" to separate trash files by location, and that I can now erase the trash in an external drive without bothering other drives.