Recovering photos from previous Photos Library.photoslibrary – overwritten by iCloud update

[naanod]

Hello all,

Long story short, I backed up my mom's iPhone photos onto her macbook and thought it would be okay to delete them from her phone once I saw them pop up on her Mac. I thought it would work just fine since that's how I have mine setup, but apparently her's is setup differently with iCloud.

When I turned her macbook on a week later, all the old photos were on there, but as soon as I connected to the WIFI to backup the new ones, over 5000 photos disappeared within seconds and were replaced by a few hundred of the new ones. I tried to stop the process and export everything out that hadn't disappeared yet, but Photos said it needed to connect to the internet to get the full resolution. I didn't think straight and connected to the internet again. Now all her old photos are gone and Photos Libary.photoslibrary went from a 20 gig file to a 1 gig.

My original plan was to do a time machine backup just in case something like this happened, but I just assumed it wouldn't. I thought that since "Download originals to this Mac" was ticked in the iCloud settings it would work right. That's what I get for being impulsive and not taking the extra precaution.

Is there anyway to still recover these photos? =(

 

[Rod]

Thats terrible. When you are trying to help and things end up worse, I really sympathise but the short answer to your question is no. That is unless they are stored somewhere else. Does your mum use iCloud Photos Library? If so then they will still be there for 30 days even if you chose to delete them. Try logging into her iCloud account (Sign in to iCloud - Apple) and check to see if there is anything in the recently deleted menu. If so there is a Restore button on the top right side of the window. If not then they may well be gone.
Did you mum have a previous Time Machine backup?

 

[badshoehabit]

If it's less than 30 days since you did this, your mum's photos will still be on her phone under 'Recently Deleted.' On phone find Photos > Albums > scroll down and sideways until you find Recently Deleted.

I've used Photos for eight years now across multiple devices but do not understand iCloud one bit! I use Photo Stream to sync continuously between them and have never lost any images. Once they've synced to my MBP, I can safely delete them to free up storage on my iPhone (not that I do it very often having 128g storage).

 

[Rod]

Good call Sue I meant to include the Recently Deleted on the iPhone too.


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