How to Recover Deleted Photos on an iPhone (and When You Can't)

You deleted photos from your iPhone and want them back. The good news: Apple builds in more safety nets than most people realize, and the majority of people trying to recover deleted photos on an iPhone find them in one of the first few places below. The hard news: once a photo has been purged from an iPhone and no copy exists anywhere else, nobody can bring it back. Work through these in order, quickest first.

Step 1: Recover deleted photos from Recently Deleted

When you delete a photo or video, the Photos app moves it to Recently Deleted and keeps it there for up to 30 days.

1. Open Photos.
2. Find Utilities. On recent iOS versions it’s a section on the main Photos screen or in Collections; on older versions, tap Albums and scroll down to Utilities. The exact layout varies by iOS version.
3. Tap Recently Deleted and unlock it with Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.
4. Tap Select, choose the photos you want, and tap Recover. To bring everything back, tap Recover All.

Recovered photos return to your library with their original dates. While you’re in Utilities, also check the Hidden album. Sometimes a “missing” photo was hidden rather than deleted.

Step 2: Check iCloud Photos on the web

If iCloud Photos is turned on (Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Photos), your library and its Recently Deleted album are synced to iCloud. That means deleting a photo on your iPhone deletes it everywhere, but it also means you can recover it from any device.

1. On a computer, sign in at iCloud.com and open Photos.
2. Open Recently Deleted.
3. Select the photos and click Recover.

This is especially useful when the iPhone is lost, broken or won’t unlock.

Step 3: Look in shared albums, Messages and other apps

Copies of your photos often exist in places you’ve forgotten about:

• Shared Albums: photos you added to a Shared Album stay there even after you delete them from your library. Open the album, tap a photo, then tap the Share button and choose Save Image (wording varies slightly by iOS version).
• Messages: open a conversation, tap the contact’s name at the top, and scroll to Photos to see everything sent or received in that thread. Save what you need.
• Third-party apps: if you ever installed Google Photos, OneDrive, Dropbox or Amazon Photos with backup turned on, sign in and check, including each app’s own trash.
• Your computer: if you ever imported photos to a Mac or PC, they may still be there or in its Recycle Bin or Trash. Our deleted file recovery guide covers that side.
• Other people: anyone you sent the photos to may still have full-quality copies.

Step 4: Restore from an iCloud or computer backup

If the photos aren’t in iCloud Photos, a device backup may hold them. Before you try this, understand two important points.

A restore replaces everything on your iPhone. Your phone goes back to exactly how it was when the backup was made. Photos, messages and other data created since then will be lost unless they’re saved somewhere else first. Copy today’s new photos to a computer (or confirm they’re in iCloud Photos) before restoring.

Your iCloud backup may not include photos. When iCloud Photos is turned on, photos aren’t stored in your iCloud backup, because they’re already in iCloud. A backup only helps if iCloud Photos was off.

From an iCloud backup

1. Check what’s available: Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Backups, and note the date of the latest backup.
2. iCloud generally keeps only the most recent backup for each device, and a new backup can replace the one that still contains your photos. If you’re relying on an existing backup, consider turning off iCloud Backup temporarily until you’ve restored.
3. Erase the iPhone: Settings → General → Transfer or Reset iPhone → Erase All Content and Settings.
4. During setup, choose Restore from iCloud Backup and pick the right backup.

From a Mac or PC backup

If you back up to a computer, connect your iPhone and open Finder (Mac) or the Apple Devices app or iTunes (Windows). Select your iPhone and choose Restore Backup, then pick a backup from before the deletion. The next computer backup normally overwrites the previous one. On a Mac, you can protect an existing backup by going to Manage Backups, right-clicking it and choosing Archive.

The honest truth about permanently deleted iPhone photos

If a photo has been removed from Recently Deleted (manually or after the 30 days are up), and it isn’t in iCloud, a backup, a shared album or another app, it is almost certainly gone for good. Here’s why:

• Every modern iPhone encrypts its storage. Each file is protected by its own key. When a photo is permanently deleted, its key is destroyed, so the underlying data is unreadable even if fragments remain.
• The storage is flash memory managed by the iPhone itself. Deleted space is cleared as part of normal operation.

That means no software and no lab can recover photos purged from an iPhone, including ours. Be very careful with “iPhone data recovery” software that promises otherwise. Many of these programs mostly extract data from your existing iCloud or computer backups, which you can restore yourself at no cost. Some ask for your Apple ID password, which is a real security risk. Read is data recovery software safe? before you pay for anything.

The same applies to lost videos; our guide on how to recover deleted videos covers them, and the general photo recovery guide covers Android and camera cards.

When lab recovery does make sense

A lab can’t undo a deletion, but it can reach photos that are still on an iPhone you can’t get into because of hardware failure:

• The iPhone won’t turn on, won’t charge or is stuck in a boot loop.
• The phone has water damage or was dropped.
• The screen is black but the phone seems to be on. See phone screen black but on.

In these cases, the photos are typically still intact on the phone, and repairing the hardware enough to boot it is how they’re recovered. You’ll need to know your passcode. For more, read iPhone won’t turn on: how to recover your photos.

The bottom line

To recover deleted photos on an iPhone, check Recently Deleted first, then iCloud.com, shared albums, Messages and any other photo apps you’ve used. Restore a backup only after saving your current data, and only if that backup actually contains your photos. If a photo was purged from a working iPhone and no copy exists anywhere, it can’t be recovered by anyone.

If your iPhone has failed and your photos are trapped on it, our iPhone recovery service can help. It’s one flat $1,200 price for a single device, with free prepaid shipping, and you pay nothing unless the recovery succeeds.