When you delete photos from your iPhone’s camera roll or photos app, they get moved to a ‘recently deleted’ album where they remain for 30 days before being permanently deleted. This gives you a chance to recover any photos you may have deleted by accident.
But what happens to photos you delete from the ‘recently deleted’ album itself? Are they gone for good or do they continue to exist somewhere?
The short answer
No, photos deleted from the ‘recently deleted’ album do not stay in iCloud. Once you manually delete a photo from the ‘recently deleted’ folder, it is permanently removed from both your device storage and iCloud.
Looking at how ‘recently deleted’ works
To understand why deleted photos do not stay in iCloud, it helps to know how the ‘recently deleted’ feature works.
When you take a photo with your iPhone camera, it gets saved in the camera roll or photos app. It also automatically gets uploaded and stored in iCloud, provided you have iCloud Photos enabled.
Now, when you delete the photo, here is what happens behind the scenes:
- The photo gets removed from your camera roll or photos app.
- It gets moved to the ‘recently deleted’ folder.
- The copy in iCloud remains there unchanged.
So initially after deletion, you still have two copies – one in ‘recently deleted’ and one in iCloud.
If you leave the photo alone at this stage, after 30 days it will get permanently deleted from both locations.
However, if you manually delete it from the ‘recently deleted’ folder, that removes the iPhone copy right away. The iCloud copy gets deleted as well.
Therefore, once you manually delete a photo from ‘recently deleted’, it is gone for good from both your iPhone storage and iCloud.
What gets stored in iCloud
To further understand why deleted photos do not stay in iCloud, it helps to know what iCloud stores in the first place.
iCloud stores your photos and videos to make them accessible across all your Apple devices. So when you take photos or videos on your iPhone, they automatically get saved in iCloud as well (provided you have enabled iCloud Photos).
iCloud only stores your currently saved photos and videos. It does not maintain any independent copies or archives of your deleted content.
So if you delete a photo on your iPhone, iCloud will delete its copy too after 30 days. And if you manually delete the photo before 30 days, iCloud removes its copy immediately.
When deleted photos stay in iCloud
There are some scenarios in which your deleted photos may continue to exist in iCloud for some time:
- If you delete photos on one device but still have those photos saved on another device with iCloud Photos access, then the photos will stay in iCloud till they are deleted everywhere.
- Similarly, if you delete photos but still have recovery copies of them in your iCloud backups, then those backup copies will remain.
- In rare cases, deleted content may persist in iCloud for a few days due to sync delays before getting removed.
However, in the normal situation where you permanently delete photos from your iPhone’s ‘recently deleted’ album, they do not hang around in iCloud.
How to confirm photos are deleted from iCloud
If you want to confirm that your deleted iPhone photos no longer exist in iCloud, here are a couple of ways to check:
- Log in to icloud.com and visit the Photos section. You should not see any of your deleted photos here.
- Sync your iPhone to iTunes on your computer. The deleted photos should not show up in the iTunes backup either.
- Restore your iPhone from an iCloud backup taken before you deleted the photos. The deleted photos should not return on restoration.
As long as you don’t see the deleted photos on any synced devices or iCloud backups, you can be assured they have been permanently removed from iCloud storage.
Ways deleted photos could reappear
If you are seeing photos reappear after you deleted them from ‘recently deleted’, there are several possible explanations:
- Unsynced devices: As mentioned before, if you still have the photos on any other device not synced to iCloud, they will stay in iCloud.
- iCloud backup: If the photos exist in an iCloud backup, they can return if you restore from that backup.
- Other cloud services: If you used services like Google Photos or Dropbox to upload the photos, copies may still exist there.
- Recently deleted bug: In rare instances, a software bug may cause deleted photos to briefly reappear in the Photos app.
- Caching: Deleted content can sometimes continue to appear temporarily in cached previews before getting removed.
So if photos you thought were deleted come back, check if they still reside in any of these other locations outside of iCloud itself.
Precautions when deleting photos
To ensure photos get permanently deleted from both iPhone storage and iCloud, here are some precautions worth taking:
- Double-check photos are deleted on all your devices connected to iCloud Photos.
- Disable auto-syncing to other cloud services like Google Photos.
- Switch off iCloud backups temporarily before deleting photos.
- Wait a few days before assuming photos are completely gone from iCloud.
- Log out of iCloud and log back in to force a fresh sync.
Following these steps will minimize the chances of your deleted photos continuing to linger in iCloud storage.
Can you recover photos deleted from iCloud?
If you deleted photos from your iPhone’s ‘recently deleted’ album and want to get them back, recovery becomes difficult.
However, there are a couple of options you could try:
- iCloud backup: If you have an iCloud backup from before you permanently deleted the photos, you may be able to restore it and recover the photos.
- Third party software: Some paid software claim to recover deleted iCloud photos by scanning your account. But results are mixed.
- Professional data recovery: Experts may be able to recover deleted files by examining your iPhone or iCloud servers directly. But it’s expensive and not guaranteed.
Unfortunately once photos are deleted from both iPhone storage and iCloud, recovering them becomes very difficult. So it’s critical to exercise caution before deleting any photos permanently.
Conclusion
To summarize, photos that you manually delete from the ‘recently deleted’ album on your iPhone do not remain stored in iCloud.
Once you confirm deletion of the photos from your device, iCloud will also permanently remove its copies of the photos.
So you can be assured that photos deleted from ‘recently deleted’ are gone for good from both your iPhone and iCloud storage, unless you have backups or copies of the photos elsewhere.
Exercising caution before permanent deletion and allowing time for iCloud to sync the changes can help avoid cases where deleted photos mysteriously reappear from iCloud.