Guide to Finding Deleted Photos On iPhone

With ever-increasing storage capacity on iPhones, we tend to keep more iPhone photos on our phones than we should. Once you finally reach the stage of too many, it can cause issues with a lack of storage.

Add to this, the scenario you begin deleting pictures to find out you accidentally deleted the wrong ones.

Here, you can use this guide to see how to recover deleted photos from phone before you lose them forever.

Recently Deleted Photos On iPhone

Where are the Deleted Photos on My iPhone?

You will find that when you delete photos from your iPhone, they do not vanish right away. After this, it can be harder to do, though you do have a bit of time to try to recover them.

Luckily, Apple introduced a feature for this particular reason and placed this inside the Photos app.

If you check inside the photos app, look for the “Recently Deleted folder” area, and if you have deleted your pictures in less than 30 days, then you should be able to recover deleted photos from iPhone at this time.

Unfortunately, there is a bit more to it than this on how to retrieve deleted photos from iPhone.

If you don’t restore the pictures to your camera role during this period, then you will find they are automatically and permanently deleted from the folder.

Besides this, you will find if you deleted pictures from your iPhones camera roll, this method works. However, if you delete your photos from the “recently deleted folder,” you have no way to recover photos, which are permanently deleted photo recovery only if you made a backup.

Are Deleted Photos on iPhone Really Gone?

After first checking your deleted folder for your pictures, you may worry that they are not showing.

If you are lucky, you may have a backup of your picture in either the iCloud or iTunes and using a backup recovery utility. It is possible to get them back from there.

You can find many different recovery software you can use to recover lost or deleted pictures from your iPhone.

iCloud Recovery for your Pholo Library

iCloud Recovery

Here you can find the steps to recover lost photos from the iCloud photo library. You can use the iCloud photo library to store all your photos so they can be accessed from all your Apple and iOS devices.

To be sure, you can see these pictures; you do need iCloud photo library to be turned on, or you will not see your photos on any other devices.

Here are the straightforward steps to enable the iCloud photo library and recover your pictures from there.

  1. Head to Settings – (your name) – iCloud
  2. Tap on Photos and then turn on iCloud photo library
  3. Connect to your Wi-Fi network and then wait a while as your pictures populate your devices and you can see them

Can I Recover Permanently Deleted Photos from My iPhone

We touched on this. However, make sure you look at your ‘Just deleted’ folder. You have 30-days, and you may have overlooked their presence the first time you checked for iPhone photos you want to recover.

Here are the steps again to be sure you did not miss anything:

  1. Navigate to Photos- Albums – Recently Deleted folder
  2. Check for your missing photos and select if they are there
  3. Select and click on recover at the bottom of your screen

If this does not work, you can resort to recovery software. A good option being Stellar Phoenix (rights reserved).

Using this, you should be able to recover your photos from an iPhone by one of three methods.

  • iPhone recovery
  • iCloud backup recovery
  • iTunes backup recovery

You will use this if you do not already have a backup procedure in place. One great feature of software such as this is you can pick individual photos you want to recover instead of a batch recovery of the deleted photos form iPhone.

iTunes Backup

Recovery from the iTunes Backup

If you happened to have an iTunes backup setup, you could recover any lost pictures from there.

  1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC
  2. Start iTunes on your desktop
  3. Choose ‘Restore Backup in iTunes’ and select the latest backup
  4. Click on Restore

Recovering Lost Photos from iCloud backup

Here are the simple steps you need when restoring photos from an iCloud backup.

  1. Navigate to Settings – General – Reset – Erase All Contents and Settings
  2. Once you reach Apps and Data, tap on ‘Restore from iCloud backup.’
  3. Log in to your iCloud account
  4. Select the right backup from the shown list and then select restore
  5. Wait for the process to finish, and your iPhone reboots. By doing this, it will recover data as well as the pictures that were permanently deleted.

It is also worth backing up your phone again in case something goes wrong with the restoration process.

Once you begin this process, it does come with one downside. When you start the recovery, you will be restoring everything, which includes uninstalled apps, old text messages, and everything else you deleted.

You will find the later backups contain less data, and it is the older ones that comprise much of the things you do not want. It can be trial and error because once you restore, you may find your pictures are in an older backup. Thus, you need to restore and go through the process a second time.

And Finally…

It can happen to anyone to delete photos; they never intended to. However, with a bit of patience and taking your time, you can find how to recover deleted photos.

One thing never mentioned much is how vulnerable your pictures are as you transfer photos from iPhone to your iCloud service. You may find that some competent hackers have a full set of your images without you realising.

To be sure, all your iPhone transfers are done safely and securely, be sure to use a premium VPN service. Hence, all your pictures reach the desired destination without diverting for another person’s enjoyment.

Guide to Finding Deleted Photos On iPhone