How can I recover deleted photos from my iPhone and Mac?

I deleted photos from my mac and then cleaned out the deleted folder and thought that all the photos would remain on my iphone, but everything was deleted there too. I have absolutely no idea what to do in this situation and how to get all the deleted photos back. My iphone storage shows that the photo app is currently taking up 66 gb on my iphone, although there are only 7,000 photos left in the photo app, which means that the deleted photos are still somewhere.




[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: How to get back deleted photos?

Posted on Aug 14, 2025 11:52 PM

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5 replies

Aug 15, 2025 12:40 AM in response to yuya100

It looks like you are using iCloud Photos. With iCloud Photos enabled on all your devices, iCloud is ensuring that the Photo Library will be identical on all your synced devices and in iCloud, so any photo you delete from your Mac will be deleted from the iPhone and from iCloud as well. The Recently Deleted album is the only safety line offered by Photos. If Recently Deleted is empty, you have to use your backups to recover the photos.

Have you set up Time Machine on your Mac to make regular backups?


Then try to restore a copy of your Photos Library from Time Machine: Restore a photo library from Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support


Do not overwrite your current library when you restore the library from an older backup, because the most recent photos may be missing,



Aug 15, 2025 01:04 AM in response to léonie

Hello! Thanks for reply

unfortunately I don't have backups on my mac. What about my iPhone storage? as I wrote above, the storage shows that the photos take up 66 GB on my iPhone, which can't be true, because I had this amount of photos before deleting them. I mean, the memory shows the amount of photos before deleting them - that is, the deleted photos are still stored somewhere?

Aug 15, 2025 02:09 AM in response to yuya100

On modern iPhones it is hopeless to try to use expensive data recovery, just a waste of money.


If your Mac does not have an internal SSD but a good old mechanical internal hard drive, you could try data recovery there. But even on your Mac you may not be able to recover much, if the reason for deleting the photos has been lack of storage. Then the storage, where the photos have been, will have been overwritten by other data. The longer we wait, the more data will be lost.


If you have been using iCloud Photos (have you?), check also the iCloud webpage at www.icloud.com

If you are lucky, Recently Deleted has nt yet been emptied there.




Aug 15, 2025 03:33 AM in response to yuya100

If you are not using iCloud Photos, deleting Photos on the Mac should not delete them from the iPhone, unless you are syncing selected albums manually with iTunes or the Finder over the air. But then the photos ion the iPhone are in a reduced resolution anyway.


On your Mac, try the following:

  • Select the Photos Library.photoslibrary in the Finder. Usually this library is in your Pictures folder.
  • CTRL-click the Library. Select "Show Package Contents".
  • This will open a Finder window showing you the folders inside the the library. Be very careful not to modify anything, just look.
  • is there a folder called iPhone Photo Cache (or iPod Photo cache)? If yes, open this folder and look for the photos from your missing albums. are they still there or have already been removed?


How can I recover deleted photos from my iPhone and Mac?

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