I have about 9,000 photos stored in my iCloud photo library. Last night as I was going through the storage on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, I noticed photos was taking up quite a bit of space so to try to pare it down, I went to the settings for photos and toggled off/on the iCloud Photo Library option.
When I toggled it off, I went to the photos app and waited for all the photos to drop off my device. Once the library was completely empty, I noticed I still had two folders (albeit empty) on my iPhone. Thinking it was just a residual from the now unsynced photos, I deleted them from my device.
This was apparently a mistake. I can’t figure out why, but even though iCloud Photo Library was disabled on my iPhone, deleting these folders in turn deleted all the albums housed within them from my iCloud Photo Library on all my devices. When I toggled iCloud Photo Library back on on my iPhone, the two folders I removed were gone as well.
Is there any way to recover the two folders? Or at least the albums within the two folders? All my photos are untouched so I didn’t lose any there, but I spent a LOT of time over the years organizing my photos into albums and having to do it again will be a huge disappointment.
Searching Google only returns results for recovering a deleted photo from the recently deleted album but since these are folders I’m looking to recover, obviously they are not there.
I would like to note as well that the photos app on my Mac still thinks the photos belonging to the albums within the folders that were deleted are still in their albums, I just can’t see them. I know this because I have a smart album set up which automatically collects any photos I’ve taken that don’t live in their own album (which makes it super easy for me to sort through).
When I toggled it off, I went to the photos app and waited for all the photos to drop off my device. Once the library was completely empty, I noticed I still had two folders (albeit empty) on my iPhone. Thinking it was just a residual from the now unsynced photos, I deleted them from my device.
This was apparently a mistake. I can’t figure out why, but even though iCloud Photo Library was disabled on my iPhone, deleting these folders in turn deleted all the albums housed within them from my iCloud Photo Library on all my devices. When I toggled iCloud Photo Library back on on my iPhone, the two folders I removed were gone as well.
Is there any way to recover the two folders? Or at least the albums within the two folders? All my photos are untouched so I didn’t lose any there, but I spent a LOT of time over the years organizing my photos into albums and having to do it again will be a huge disappointment.
Searching Google only returns results for recovering a deleted photo from the recently deleted album but since these are folders I’m looking to recover, obviously they are not there.
I would like to note as well that the photos app on my Mac still thinks the photos belonging to the albums within the folders that were deleted are still in their albums, I just can’t see them. I know this because I have a smart album set up which automatically collects any photos I’ve taken that don’t live in their own album (which makes it super easy for me to sort through).