How to Recover Deleted Photos App Pictures for Mac OS X

Summary: This blog offers methods to recover deleted photos app pictures for Mac OS X. This post discusses user issues regarding lost photos from Photos App and provides the best solutions to restore the missing pictures from Mac OS X.

“I updated my MacBook pro. After this, I opened my MacBook and realized that almost all my photos from the Photo App had disappeared (years of photos). I don’t use iCloud and I don’t have a time machine back-up. How do I get the photos back?”

Your photos are undeniably important. Even the thought of losing them makes you uncomfortable. Hence, to keep them safe and organized, you use Photos App in your Mac OS X. However, you may lose access to your precious pictures due to accidental deletion or some other system error. Accidental photos deletion is so common that we decided to find some effective methods to recover such deleted pictures from the Photos app.

Simple Methods to Recover Deleted Pictures from Photos App

There are two methods to get back your photos. If your photos have been deleted from Photos App, you can recover them from the app itself. However, in case you deleted pictures from your Mac hard drive or other storage media, use the best Mac photo recovery tool to recover deleted pictures on Mac.

Method 1: Retrieve Pictures using the Photos App

The Photos App enables you to easily store and manage photos and videos in Mac OS. If you accidentally deleted pictures on the Photos App, you can recover the pictures from the app itself. Just follow the given steps:

If you accidentally deleted pictures in Photos App, you can recover the pictures from the application itself. The Photos App enables you to easily store and manage photos and video in Mac OS. In case of accidental deletion from this app, you can restore the photos by following the given steps:

• Go to Photos App in Mac OS X and open ‘Recently Deleted’ (See Figure 1).
  
  

  [Figure 1: Recently Deleted section]

• Select the picture(s) and/or video(s) to retrieve. After selecting, you will be able to see a blue check mark in the corner of the thumbnail, showing they are selected. (See Figure 2)
  
  

  [Figure 2: Select Deleted Picture Screen]

• Click Recover at the upper-right corner of the application to restore the selected pictures or videos, and send it to their original destination. (See Figure 3)
  
  

  [Figure 3: Recover Deleted Picture]

Once done, exit the ‘Recently Deleted’ section.

Note: The images get permanently deleted from Recently Deleted album in Photos App after 30 days from the initial photos removal. Also, if there is no space available on the disk, the pictures might be deleted before the estimated duration.

Method 2: Recover Deleted Pictures with the Best Mac Photo Recovery Tool

If you are not able to restore photos from your Photos app, you may have lost them from the hard drive itself. In such cases, it is always safer to opt for the best Mac Photo Recovery tool like Stellar Photo Recovery. This DIY (do-it-yourself) software can retrieve accidentally deleted, lost, formatted pictures, videos, audios and other multimedia files from Mac OS X. The software can restore data from MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro, etc. You can find deleted photos on Mac and get them back even from Time Machine, camera memory cards, and other Mac-based storage devices, etc. To re-gain access to your photos, follow the given steps:

Note: Stop using the drive from which you lost your pictures, else it will overwrite the space and reduce your chances of photo recovery.

1. Download, install and run Stellar Mac Photo Recovery for Mac.
2. From ‘Select What to Recover’ screen, select Photos and click Next. (See Figure 4)
   
   

   [Figure 4: Select What to Recover Screen]

3. Select the drive or storage media from Recover Photo, Audio & Video interface and click Scan. (See Figure 5)
   
   

   [Figure 5: Select Location/Drive from Recover Audio & Video interface]

4. You can also use ‘Advanced Settings’ icon on the top to Add file type or Edit File type, or Filter to scan for faster results. Click Next. (See Figure 6)
   
   

   [Figure 6: Advanced Settings Screen]

6. On doing so, a dialog box showing ‘Scanning Completed Successfully!’ will be displayed. A list of scanned files and folders will also be listed. You may turn on the file preview option before recovering your deleted pictures from Mac OS X.
7. Select the pictures you want to restore and click Recover. (See Figure 7)
   
   

   [Figure 7: Recover Photo Screen]

• Specify the location and click Save to save the pictures.

Caution: Avoid saving the retrieved pictures in the affected drive or PC. Use an external storage media or cloud storage for keeping your photos safe.

Wrapping Up

It’s always better to have backup of all your essential data to avoid data loss due to accidental deletion or other reasons. However, in case of no back-up, when you lose your important pictures from Photos App in Mac OS X, you can easily restore them from the app itself. Search for the missing pictures in the “Recently Deleted” album, select the ones you want to retrieve and save. In case you lost pictures from your Mac hard drive, you can use a powerful Mac data recovery tool such as Stellar Photo Recovery for Mac to recover them.