Photos missing from your iPhone?

Here's why this could have happened and how to recover them

13:50 31 October 2020

Are some photos from your iPhone missing? Don’t panic! This article will help you understand how this could have happened and how to recover them. Keep reading below to find out why your photos might be missing and how to get them back. 

 

So, you’ve scrolled through your entire photo library but still can’t find some of your photos, and you’re not quite sure where they could have gone. We get it. It can be really disappointing to lose photos of family and friends or the most special events in your life. We all take pictures to commemorate events, share them with others on social media, or to print them and frame them. 

 

But, before you panic, find out that missing photos isn’t always bad news! Our article will explain how to recover deleted photos from iPhone and what are the best ways to prevent it from happening again. 

 

Why are my photos missing from my iPhone?

 

The first step towards recovering your missing photos is to find out why they are missing. You can’t know what the best way to recover these digital memories is if you don’t know the cause of the problem. 

 

Now, here’s the thing: accidentally deleting your pictures isn’t the only way to lose your precious digital memories, even if this could have happened as well. There are a few more reasons why the photos from your iPhone may be missing, including: 

 

• iOS upgrade- most of the time, when iPhone users upgrade their phone to the latest version of iOS, they face diverse data loss problems, such as losing messages, missing contacts, or missing photos. This can happen due to various reasons such as shortage of iPhone space, photostream is not working or is disabled, or the user may log into a different iCloud account. 
  
  
• Someone else deleted your photos – if you’ve given your iPhone to someone else, they might have deleted your photos by accident or on purpose. For example, maybe you gave your iPhone to your kids to play on it, and they accidentally deleted all your photos. 
• The photos you are looking for are hidden.
  
  
• Deleted photos- Even if you don’t realize it, you may have deleted your photos by accident. If, for example, you’ve deleted some images from your iPhone, it can be possible that you’ve also selected the photos you wanted to keep before clicking the “Delete” button. 
  
  

How to recover deleted photos

Now you know what might have been the cause behind your missing digital memories. It’s time to find out how to recover them. 

There are a few methods to recover deleted photos from your iPhone based on what may have caused them to be missing from your device, including: 

How to restore deleted photos on iPhone

The first place to check for the photos you want to recover is the Recently Deleted folder on your device. Suppose you or someone else deleted the photos by accident or on purpose. If that’s the case, you will find them in this folder. 

Open the album and look for the photos you want back. If you find them there, simply tap on each of them and then tap on the button “Recover.” In just a few seconds, the photos should be back in the main photo album. 

Extract photos from iTunes backup

If the photos you were looking for aren’t in the Recently Deleted album, don’t panic, you still have a few more ways to recover them. 

If you have created backups of your data with iTunes, you have a high chance of getting your photos back on your iPhone. Yet, this can be a tricky business because you can never know exactly what is in the backup you’ve made and what will come back on your iPhone. What’s more, when you carry out a full restoration of your device, this will wipe the existing data and restore your device to the iTunes backup file. You’ll get back the photos that you wanted to recover, but you will lose all the data you’ve added to your iPhone since the last backup version. 

So, to prevent that from happening, you can use a recovery tool that allows you to find your deleted photos in the backup file. This tool allows you to go through all the data saved in your backup and only select the images you want back on your device so you can retrieve deleted images without having a backup. Since you don’t have to carry out an entire backup with all the data saved in it, you won’t lose the data you have on your phone that you’ve added after the last backup was made. 

How to prevent having missing photos again

In conclusion, we’d like to help you learn how to prevent having your photos deleted from your iPhone again. 

First of all, the best piece of advice we can give you is to be careful about the photos you delete. Most of the time, missing photos happen because iPhone users delete them by accident when selecting a ton of images at once and errantly select the one they want to keep. Although recovering your photos from the Recently Deleted album is really easy, keep in mind that deleted photos only stay in that album for 30 days before they are deleted permanently. 

Secondly, another piece of advice to prevent losing your photos again is to turn on the iCloud Photo Library. This feature saves and stores all your images in iCloud, and you can access them at any time on any of your iCloud-connected devices. When this feature is on, you may not see the photo you are looking for in your iPhone photos album, but you can find it in iCloud.