Recovering permanently deleted iOS pictures?

[Pfunstuff]

I accidentally recently deleted several pictures the other day and later deleted them from the recently deleted pictures folder forgetting they were in there. I've tried restoring my phone from two different backups. One was from a few days ago and the other was from almost two weeks ago. Both backups restore the phone to its previous state with the pictures in question already deleted despite both backups taking place before the pictures were deleted. I only have iCloud backups. I do not have iTunes backups. Is there any other method I can try to get these pictures back, or are they gone for good? I thought the backups would restore those pictures, but they did not.

I have a 64 GB iPhone 6s Plus running the current iOS build. I had iCloud Photo Library enabled as well. I'm not sure if this matters, but I'm wondering if having the iCloud Photo Library enabled is what caused the changes to be apparently permanent as of this point.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[Tech198]

At times like these it would be good if iCloud had versioning..

I guess u could try turning on icloud photo library, but if u have deleted then from the phone, i would NOT turn it photo library on in the phone. because any updated would probably sync up deleting the one there..

Instead,, turn icloud photo library on in OS X, and see what happens.. When Apple talks abut "any edits are updated" not sure weather that would mean the original would be kept, isce by default, only appropriate size ones are on device..

This is why i say try it from Mac, because hopefully u'd get the original. That way, once the original is on your Mac, THEN turn it on in iOS and sync.

 

[Pfunstuff]

At times like these it would be good if iCloud had versioning..

I guess u could try turning on icloud photo library, but if u have deleted then from the phone, i would NOT turn it photo library on in the phone. because any updated would probably sync up deleting the one there..

Instead,, turn icloud photo library on in OS X, and see what happens.. When Apple talks abut "any edits are updated" not sure weather that would mean the original would be kept, isce by default, only appropriate size ones are on device..

This is why i say try it from Mac, because hopefully u'd get the original. That way, once the original is on your Mac, THEN turn it on in iOS and sync.

Unfortunately, I don't own a Mac. iCloud Photo Library was turned on when the deletions were initiated as well as when they were deleted from the recently deleted folder. This is why I think they are probably gone for good. I think had I not had it turned on, the pictures would have been backed up to the iCloud backups I tried which probably would have worked. Having iCloud Photo Library on prevents them from being saved to an iCloud backup, and I think that's where the problem lies. I'm thinking going forward I will either do regular backups to my PC or just leave iCloud Photo Library turned off. With it turned on, it seems as soon as they are removed from the recently deleted folder, they are gone for good. I just wish I had known they weren't being saved to my backups with this feature turned on.

I was able to recover a small number of the pictures on my phone by turning off iCloud Photo Library and turning on iCloud photo stream. The photo stream folder re-appeared and began populating pictures from what looks to be the past 30 days. Unfortunately for me, the pictures I lost were spread out over a period of seven years, so I didn't get very many back of the nearly 300 that I lost. I may just keep iCloud Photo Library turned off going forward until they change the way it works.