Recover Deleted Photos on Mac in 5 Ways (2025 Solutions)

Quick Access to Photo Recovery on Mac

Whenever you lose Mac photos or pictures, you can bring them back easily. This page offers 5 effective methods to recover deleted photos on Mac. It is easy to restore Mac photos, whether you have a backup or not. Choose a Mac picture recovery solution that fits your situation.

1. Method 1. Recover Permanently Deleted Pictures on Mac (Recommended)
2. Method 2. Restore Deleted Pictures Mac Using the Photos App (Within 30 Days)
3. Method 3. How to Retrieve Deleted Photos from Mac Trash
4. Method 4. Recover Deleted Photos on Mac with Time Machine (Don't Empty It)
5. Method 5. Recover Deleted Mac Photos from iCloud

If you deleted pictures from your Mac hard drive or other storage media, you deleted these photos permanently. But you can get them back with the best Mac photo recovery software to recover deleted pictures on Mac. Get more Mac photo recovery details using the first method.

Method 1. Recover Permanently Deleted Pictures on Mac

If you have lost photos from a Mac hard drive, you cannot restore them from the Photos app or the Trash. You only need the best Mac photo recovery tool, like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac. With it, you can easily recover deleted pictures in different image file formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF/TIF, BMP, PSD, ORF, RAF, MRW, RAW, and more.

How to recover deleted photos on Mac:

Apply this software to restore your deleted pictures or photos on a Mac hard drive or external storage devices like a USB, SD card, or external hard drive on your own.

Step 1. Search for lost photos

Launch EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac, hover the mouse over the system drive where the Photos Library is, and click "Search for lost files".

Step 2. Find pictures from the library

After finishing the scan, click "Photos" under the "Path" tab. All your lost photos will list here.

Step 3. Recover photos from the library

Double-click to preview the photo, select the right one and click "Recover" to save the images to another secure location on your Mac.

This Mac picture recovery software fully supports Mac HFS+/FAT/NTFS/NTFS5 file system on macOS and Mac OS X. What's more, it works great in helping solve the following problems:

• Recover deleted photos, music files, and other multimedia types of data.
• Recover a recently deleted photo with the original name and path.
• Recover photos from SD card on Mac, Compact Flash cards, USB memory sticks, PC hard drives, etc.
• Restore photos from partitions that have been lost, overwritten, or damaged by a virus on a Mac hard drive.

Also read: How to Recover Permanently Deleted Photos on iPhone

If you find this information helpful, please share it with others on social media to assist them in overcoming this common challenge.

Method 2. How to Recover Deleted Photos on Mac Using the Photos App

The Photos App is a built-in tool on Mac that classifies and manages pictures and photos. If you accidentally deleted photos on the Mac Photos app, don't worry. The Photos App will save your deleted items in the Recently Deleted album for 30 days.

You can directly recover the deleted photos from the Photos App:

Step 1. Open Photos.

Step 2. Select Albums from the column on the left and double-click "Recently Deleted" (in older versions of Photos, you'll find Recently Deleted along the top).

Step 3. You'll see thumbnails of photos and videos you've deleted recently, with a caption under each one indicating how long it's left. Select the photo(s) you want to get back.

Step 4. Click "Recover" at the top right. (If you want to save space and you've just deleted a bunch of large files, and you're certain you won't want them back, you can also click Delete All.)

Then, you can return to the original album in Photos to check and use the recovered photos again.

Method 3. How to Retrieve Deleted Photos from Mac Trash

If you happen to delete or remove photos from the Mac hard drive or desktop to the Trash, you know that you can directly undo empty Trash and restore deleted photos easily.

Step 1. Open the Trash Bin icon on your desktop, and you can see all the deleted pictures there.

Step 2. Find the images or pictures you want to recover, drag them to the desktop. Or right-click on them and select the "put back" option to recover deleted photos on Mac from the Trash. The photos will return to their original location.

Method 4. Recover Deleted Photos on Mac with Time Machine

If you have created backups of the deleted photos with Time Machine, follow this method! Your photos, images, and pictures are all safe. And you can simply follow the steps below to restore the lost photos.

Step 1. Connect the Time Machine backup disk to your Mac and click the "Time Machine" icon at the Status menu on Mac. You can also click "Finder", and then open the "Time Machine" application.

Step 2. On the bottom and the right corner of the screen of Mac, scroll the Timeline to find the date when you did a backup of photos. 

You can also click the up arrow next to the Time Machine window to find the right backup version. You can double-click a photo or picture to check if they are your lost photos.

Step 3. Select the wanted photos and click "Restore" to retrieve the old versions of overwritten photos.

Method 5. Restore Deleted Mac Photos from iCloud

Most people backup Mac to iCloud as the central repository for their digital lives, including everything from calendars to photos. iCloud Photo Library can save all the images you take with your iDevice, or upload to your Mac from a memory card, and send them to all your devices so you can view them anywhere.

Steps to restore Mac photos from iCloud:

Step 1. Go to iCloud.com in any web browser (you might need to sign in).

Step 2. Click "Photos". Then, click "Albums" at the top.

Step 3. Click the Recently Deleted album.

Step 4. Select the photos you want to restore and click "Recover".

Additional Tips - Reasons Leading to Mac Photo Loss

Pictures, photos, and images could be easily lost on Mac and other devices for various reasons. Here are the common causes of Mac image loss:

How to Avoid Mac Photo or Data Loss

Many cases can cause Mac data loss. The easiest way to protect your data is by creating a Mac backup. macOS's Time Machine is a great built-in utility to handle backups automatically. 

Back up Mac data with Time Machine:

Step 1. Connect an external hard drive to your computer or MacBook

Step 2. Go to "System Preferences > Time Machine > Select Backup Disk".

Step 3. Select the location where you want to save the Time Machine backups and click "Use disk".

Step 4. Tick the "Back Up Automatically" option to set Time Machine to back up everything on your Mac automatically.

Also Read: How to Backup Mac without Time Machine

Conclusion

These five solutions above can help you recover deleted photos from Photos App, Trash bin, Time Machine, or Mac hard drive/storage devices with Mac file recovery software. By the way, it's always better to have a backup of all your essential data to avoid data loss due to accidental deletion or other reasons. If you don't have any backup, the EaseUS Mac data recovery tool can always do you a favor.

Many Mac users have proved the efficacy of the tool. If you want to resolve the Mac files recovery issue, share it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms!

How to Recover Permanently Deleted Photos on Mac FAQs

If you still have some questions about Mac's photo recovery, check the quick answers below to help yourself out:

1. Is it possible to recover deleted photos after deleting them permanently?

Images that have been irreversibly deleted can still be recovered with the aid of picture recovery software, even though they are difficult to retrieve from the Recycle Bin on Windows or Trash on Mac.

2. Where do permanently deleted photos go Mac?

The Recently Deleted album shows in the sidebar when you delete a photo. Open the album to see recently removed objects and restore them to your Photos collection. On your Mac, select Recently Deleted from the sidebar of the Photos app.

3. Can I ever recover deleted photos on Apple Photos?

You can restore recently deleted photos from the Photos app on Mac:

• Go to the Photos app on your Mac.
• Click Utilities in the left sidebar, then click Recently Deleted.
• Select the deleted photos you want to restore.
• Click Recover.

4. Does Apple store permanently deleted photos?

Videos and pictures that you remove are kept for 30 days in your Recently Deleted album. They will be permanently removed after 30 days.