I think I just lost all my photos

Do you have iCloud Photo Library enabled in Photos on your Mac and Photos on your iPhone? Then you may have indeed deleted your photos every where.

The main purpose of iCloud Photo Library is to keep all your photos libraries in sync. All photos, all deletions, and all edits will transfer over the air from iCloud Photo LIbrary.

• If you import a photo on one device, it will automatically appear on all other devices.
• If you delete a photo from one device, it will be deleted from all devices.
• If you edit a photo on one device, the edits will update across all devices.

So don't use iCloud Photo Library, if you do not want to have the same photos on all your devices. WIth iCloud Photo Library enabed it is pointless to import from your iPhone via USB. The iPhone cannot have new photos, unless it has been offline while you were takng pictures. Any photos showing as new will be originals downloaded from iCloud to the iPhone, that are already on your Mac. And if you import them to the Mac as new, the photos will sync back to the iPhone via iCloud.

To recover the photos you deleted restore them from a Time Machine backup of your Mac. The Photos Library n your Mac will be part of your regular Time Machine backups. If you do not have a Time Machine backup, try photo recovery software.

Apple does not have disk recovery software -- File salvage is a recommended one (the demo will tell you what can be recovered - you need to purchase to actually recover the files)

and for the future if you use iCloud Photo Library you probably need to set Optimized photos on any device with limited storage space

LN

hillray463 wrote:

My phone starting running out of space. The normal annoying storage message kept popping up, so I uploaded all of my photos to my new Mac. Then I deleted them off my phone and deleted everything in my "Recently Deleted". I just now looked on my laptop and saw that they all got deleted too. The only ones left are the ones that are still on my phone. Like, what?! I thought that they would save on my Mac! Is there a way to recover them? I have so many important family photos that are now gone...

If you do not have a time machine backup -- check with Apple to see if they can restore your photos to the cloud from a backup of that server (it may cost you - if the backup exists - sort of a very large time machine)

If you still want to have current pictures on your phone - only the PHOTO SYSTEM Library is synchronized across all devices - so you could export your current photographs from the system library - then import them into a non-system library for safe keeping)

These apple support sites for photos may help you get ideas as to what to do.

photo getting started

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204655

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204410

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204476