Five Ways To Recover Your Photos or Videos on an iPhone

For most people, photos are precious data stored in their phones. It is very frustrating to lose your adorable images. However, you might accidentally lose them with a single wrong tap. If you accidentally delete your photos, you can recover them using different methods.

This article will address methods you can adopt to recover your deleted photos on an iPhone.

Recover the deleted photos from iPhone

One of the easiest ways to recover deleted photos from an iPhone is by restoring them from a ‘recently deleted’ photo folder. This folder of the photo app is just like the recycle bin on your computer where all the deleted photos of the iPhone go. The folder can keep the deleted photos and videos for up to 40 days; during this period, you can freely recover the deleted files to your photo gallery. However, all photos in this folder get deleted permanently after this time period.

To retrieve accidentally deleted photos or videos, follow these steps.

1. Open the photo app, then tap on Album on the bottom menu.
2. From there, choose the recently deleted folder.
3. Upon Scrolling down, you will see the utilities section. From there, tap on recently deleted.
4. Now tap ‘select’ at the upper right corner of the screen. You might select ‘recover all’ or the individual photos you want to recover.
5. Now tap on ‘recover’ in the lower right corner.

Recover deleted photos from iCloud backups

One of the easiest ways to store pictures online is by enabling the ‘iCloud photos’ feature in iCloud settings. All photos are automatically uploaded to the iCloud server associated with the same iCloud account. When you delete photos on an iPhone, they will move to the Recently Deleted Album for 30 days. After that period, these photos get deleted from iCloud automatically. However, if the photos are not connected to the internet recently, the photos may not be synchronised and can be downloaded to your computer. Within 30 days, if you change your mind, you can retrieve the photos by visiting iCloud.com by following these steps:

1. Go to iCloud.com to access Apple cloud service for free.
2. To access photos log in with your Apple ID and password.
3. After logging in, click the Recently Deleted folder in the sidebar. You got the list of photos ready to delete within 40 days.
4. Select the photos or videos you want to recover from here, then click ‘Recover’ at the bottom.

The above procedure will immediately move the deleted photos to the photo app on the iPhone.

Reveal the hidden Photos

Sometimes the iPhone missing photos have a chance of being accidentally hidden so that they won’t appear in the standard library with other photographs. These hidden pictures can be found by

1. going into the photo app,
2. Select the ‘album’ tab and scroll to the bottom.
3. Tapping the ‘hidden’ tab will reveal the contents, and if the missing pictures are found, they can be restored to the library with just a tap.

Note that only the owner of the iPhone can look inside those special albums due to security in IOS 16 for recently deleted albums.

Recover photos from iTunes backup

If you have a recent iPhone backup, consider restoring the backup to your iPhone. But remember that restoring a backup will overwrite the existing content of your device with the content stored in the backup. So, it is best to copy important information from your iPhone to the computer before restoring the backup.

To recover photos using iTunes

1. Connect your iPhone to your computer.
2. Launch iTunes if it doesn’t open automatically.
3. Click your device icon when it appears in iTunes.Hit ‘Restore Backup…’.
4. Pik the backup you want to restore and click ‘Restore.’
5. Tap Restore and wait for the restore process to finish. Your device will restart and then sync.

Restore deleted iPhone photos from Mac or window PC

Another way to recover the deleted photos is from the Mac photo library if the iPhone photos have been recently imported to Mac photo apps. If AirDrop is used to import files from an iPhone to a Mac, they are found in the Downloads folder. If photos are sent to Mac by using the Image Capture app, they will be found in the Pictures folder by default. It’s a good idea to check the photos app, downloads folder, and pictures folder, as there is a chance that missing photos might have been found there. Similarly, the missing photos might be available on the computer if the iPhone photos are shared to a Windows PC.

To avoid photo loss in the future, have more than one backup and be more careful.