I noticed today that my photos are gone from my 23 Albums but not my Shared Albums. I sync photos with iCloud. The photos that were in my Albums no longer show in my Library. It would seem that they are Hidden, but they don't show there, either. They also do not show in the Recently Deleted folder.
Thanks for the help!
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Photos disappeared from Albums
Shared Albums are completely separate from the Library. Deleting pictures from albums doesn't delete them from the Library. What you're describing is extremely odd. There's no "Select All" in the Library (and I now understand why,) so it would be hard to delete every picture.
Have you looked to see what's at iCloud.com? I would also double check to be sure that you are connected to the same Apple Account that you were before-- like in a magic show, looking the other way may make things seem to disappear. Who else has access to this account?
I would also check the Filters in the Library view as well as the sorting to be sure you haven't filtered everything out.
Deleted pictures remain in the "Recently Deleted" view for 30 days, and then they are removed permanently. This safety feature can be defeated by choosing to prematurely delete pictures from the "Recently Deleted" view. If you use iCloud Photos, then that "synchronizes" its Photos Library with the phone, so what you see on the phone is what is at iCloud. iCloud Photos doesn't keep pictures in "Recently Deleted" any longer than the phone does.
You can see this:
If you're missing photos or videos in the Photos app - Apple Support
Basically the above says to look in Recently Deleted and in Hidden.
If you don't keep your own backups to an external drive, then there really isn't any place else to look.
Thank you for your quick reply, Richard.
I am with you on all your points; however, I have since observed that, in opening iCloud, the albums are all there under Collections and the photos are there as well, but they have the eye with diagonal through them. So, I can download them all individually or by batch, but only to the Downloads folder (using my MacBook here).
I do back up to an external hard drive.
Can you add anything further? Thank you.
Update - I "unhid" all my photos and all the photos reappeared in the albums as before. I should note that the hidden photos were not all of the photos in my albums previously, but by unhiding the ones in the Hidden folder, all the missing album photos reappeared. Mystery. Case closed.
Great!
Marking a picture as "Hidden" doesn't remove it from its album lists.
Photos missing from Albums but not Shared Albums on iPhone with iCloud sync
