Deleted photos came back after restoring

Where is your Photos Library stored? In the Pictures folder on your system drive, or on an external drive?

There may be two possible reasons for seeing deleted pictures again. Either you are viewing a different library than previously, perhaps a library on a connected backup drive, or photos recovered deleted pictures, when it rebuild your Photos library, after you restored it from the backup. Is there a folder Or album with "recovered items" in its name?

If you previously migrated an iPhoto Library, it may have contained items in the library, that had lost the connection to the thumbnails., so you do not see them. But rebuilding the library will reveal them. Or external editors may have saved edited versions directly in the library and wasting storage this way.

But check, which library is currently open in Photos. You can see the path to the library in the Photos. preferences General. If it is the wrong library, double click the library you want to use to open it in Photos.

So they would have been saved in the same Pictures library in the back up, it should point to exactly the same place.

Did you check it, Katherine?

When Photos is running, open the Preferences . From the main menu bar: Photos > Preferences, click the "General" tab. What is the Library path, that is shown there? Click "Show in Finder" to reveal the library.

Is iCloud Photo Library enabled or My Photo Stream? Then the photos may have been synced back to your library from iCloud.

Pleas check the preferences for Photos > Preferences >iCloud.

Many of them are from YEARS ago that I know were not saved, I and were deleted at the time,

This may be because a glitch of iOS 8. Some years ago, users reported "ghost photos" on their iPhone - invisible photos they could not delete. Only if the users set back the data and time of the iPhone to the time the photos had been moved to "recently deleted", they showed up again in "recently deleted" and could be removed completely.

When you made the backup years ago, you may have saved these ghost photos. That bug seems to be fixed in the newer versions of iOS, and I am quite confident that deleting the photos now will delete them permanently.

Your post is not clear and provides no context

What version of the OS do you have? Are you using iCloud Photo Library? You restored an old library (iPhoto or Photos?) so you would expect your photos to be restored as of the library you restored. How many photos do you have? Really 100,000s ?

Basically when you delete a photo from Photos or iPhoto and delete it from the iPhoto trash or Photos recently deleted album it is gone so again your post does not make sense

LN

Same issue that you described qatherine.

MAC OS 10.13.2 High Sierra

Phone OS 11.2.1

Not a user of iCloud, and my devices have all auto syncs off. No external file storage. And no sharing between MacBook and phone enabled.

Got new iphone 7. Emptied trash on old iPhone 6. Backed up 6 through ITunes. New iPhone 7. Restored from iTunes.

Now? 8,000 photos in my deleted photo folder on my phone that were not there when I synced my phone for backup for the sole purpose of moving data to new phone. Many of them are from YEARS ago that I know were not saved, I and were deleted at the time, and as my iphone 6 has not been backed up since I got it, I cant see how any of those photos would have been still around when many were deleted years ago. I am also a person that monthly empties the Deleted Items folder on my phone so I dont use up all that space, so yes I am sure they were deleted.

Now I am wondering if they ever really were deleted.... and why bother deleting the deleted folder if they dont really go away? And does that mean that if I now delete these 8000 photos, they will be back again?

When you made the backup years ago, you may have saved these ghost photos

Possible for a very few. Except that I backed up the phone when I got it back in 2015, and then when I changed over to my new one a few weeks ago. There was no backup between, and the photos that are showing, were taken between those two backups and deleted off the phone before the backup earlier this month.

So in theory, there should be no records of those photos having existed.