Quickly recover deleted photos from your iOS device

PhotosIconXApple’s iPhone and iPad are great to use for snapping a quick photo, and with the ever-increasing number of features at your disposal, such as time-lapse, panorama, and video options, it is easy to end up with thousands of photos on your device. When managing your photos, you may inadvertently delete some and wish to get them back. If the photo was not deleted too long ago, then you may be in luck and have a quick recovery option right at your fingertips.

The Photos app on your iPhone or iPad stores photos in collections called Moments, which will have them organized based on time and location. However, it also supports the option of managing photos in albums. These may be custom albums, but by default your phone will create albums for photos of various attributes, including panoramas, videos, and time-lapse videos.

In addition to these albums, Photos will create a special one for recently deleted items, which will contain any photo or video that was deleted, but which has not yet been removed from your device:

  1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad
  2. Tap “Albums” at the bottom-right
  3. Now tap the “Albums” option at the top-left
  4. Scroll through the list of albums and select “Recently Deleted”

Now you can peruse your recently deleted photos, which should be labeled by the time frame from when they were deleted. You can then tap a photo preview it, and then tap “Recover” to restore it to your Photos library. Alternatively, if you wish to fully remove the photo, then you can tap “Delete” and it will be gone forever.

iOS recovering deleted photos

After choosing the Recently Deleted album, you can tap a specific image to preview it and then choose options to either permanently delete it, or restore it to your album.