Recovering deleted photos, possibly from iCloud

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Recovering deleted photos, possibly from iCloud

I truly don't know what happened here.

I have an old MacBook Pro, purchased in 2012 and discontinued use in 2020 for a new MacBook Air. I transferred everything (or at least I thought I did) from the Pro to the Air. I transferred all my photos (thousands of them, due to being a photojournalist), music, files, etc. At some point, I decided to upload all the photos to the cloud. I didn't realize this would load ALLLL the photos onto my phone as well. It was overwhelming, and I ended up taking the photo iCloud off my phone. This was years ago (sometime after 2021, I'm guessing).

I recently went to look for an older photo and discovered it wasn't on my Air. I broke out the old Pro (surprisingly booted up fine!), and it only has photos up until January 2017. I really don't know why this date, as I was using the computer until summer 2020. My Air has a handful of photos from 2013, 2014 and 2019, but it really starts at 2020 with the new Air. The dates are all over the place, and don't align with major changes (like transferring from the Pro to the Air).

All of this background to ask how I might recover photos. I have lost all photos of my husband and me prior to 2020 (we met at the very end of 2017).

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jul 9, 2025 10:16 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 9, 2025 10:39 AM in response to lizette78

I don't think that there is any place to look that you haven't thought of. The only iCloud place to look is at iCloud.com; so there's the two computers, your phone, and iCloud.

My guess is that some of the pictures were transferred in some way that they were not totally in the control of Photos, so they didn't get transferred to iCloud Photos. Pictures transferred by cable from a computer to a phone by cable, for instance are viewable in Photos, but they don't belong to Photos, so they can get lost in further transfers. Unfortunately, I know from experience that when you have tons of pictures, it's easy to lose track of some.

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