How to recover deleted photos from iPhone

Deleting a photo by mistake can happen to anyone. Luckily for you, it is possible to recover deleted pictures from iPhone in an easy way

Hands up who has never accidentally deleted at least one photo among those taken with his iPhone. In fact, photos are one of the easiest contents to produce with modern smartphones, but they often get deleted inadvertently. Usually this happens when we realize that we’re running out of space on our device and, gripped by anxiety, we start deleting dozens and dozens of files (including photos and videos) that we think we don’t need anymore.

But how to recover photos if we accidentally deleted them from the iPhone? Fortunately, the procedure to do so exists, in fact, there are several. But the first thing to do is to figure out when the photo, or photos, in question were deleted. That’s because Apple’s smartphones, starting with iOS 8 (and thus from as far back as 2014), don’t delete files immediately but move them to the “Recently Deleted” folder. Which is nothing but the smartphone version of the very normal trash we have on our computers: deleted files stay there for 30 days, unless you select them one by one (or groups) and delete them permanently. To recover a deleted photo from your iPhone, therefore, the first thing to do is to check if it is inside this photo gallery folder. If it’s not there, however, before relying on third-party (often paid) applications you can hope to find it in an iCloud or iTunes backup.

Recovery Photos from iCloud Backup

If you have iCloud backup enabled on your iPhone, then your personal files will be automatically stored on Apple’s servers. So if you accidentally deleted a photo, you might find it there. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to know the exact contents of every backup performed independently by iOS, only the date of the last backup. To see when the last backup was made, open iPhone Settings, tap on your profile and then on iCloud Backup. On the next screen you’ll find the switch to enable and disable the backup and an indication of the day and time of the last backup made by the smartphone’s operating system.

At this point it’s up to you to choose whether to restore that backup in the hope of finding the deleted photo: by doing so, in fact, you’ll delete all your data after that backup from your smartphone and replace them with those present in the archive you’re going to restore.

Recovery photos from iTunes backup

Unlike an iCloud backup, an iTunes backup is a local copy of your data that is made when you connect your iPhone via cable to your computer with the iTunes application installed. It’s less used today than in the past, but iTunes remains a great way to save a copy of your data and is infinitely more useful than iCloud for recovering an accidentally deleted photo. To do this, connect your iPhone to your computer and, if it doesn’t start automatically, launch iTunes. When you see that your iOS mobile device has appeared in the left column, click on Summary in the Settings section. Right after that, from the Backup section, click on Restore Backup. All your latest data, including the photo you were looking for, should now be back on your iPhone.