A geek post regarding Apple devices – you might not understand if you don’t have an “i-xxx” device.
A month or ago, I looked at all the photos on the iPad (copied from my phone) and decided to finally organize them (more than a few thousand taken over the last few years) into “albums”, in order to reduce the size of my “camera roll”. This also includes any screen shots or pics I’ve downloaded from Facebook, etc.
So, I created an album, and moved a small set of pics from the “camera roll”, intending to delete that set of pics from the camera roll.
You would think there would be a way to reduce the size of your camera roll to only show the most current ones or just ones of your own choosing.
Nope.
They don’t allow that. If you delete any pics from your camera roll, even if you have copied them into an album, if you delete them from the camera roll, they also get deleted from that album.
Ok. I understand the technical aspects of this and I’m not going to even go there (the copy is just a pointer to the real pic, and is not an actual “copy”) – Apple made a decision to do it this way, and there isn’t anything I can do to make them change their design.
However, I can buy me an IOS app which does what I want. It’s called “Photo album – private organizer with slide shows – created by Elizabeth Jayaseelan.” I think it’s around $5.
This app allows you to move your photos off the camera roll and into albums. However, you now need to use two apps to look at your photos: Apple’s “photos” app which shows your “camera roll” (of your current pics and/or pics you want to see all the time, etc.), and then the second app is, of course, the one just mentioned (the photo album app). Once you copy the photos off the camera roll into this new app’s albums, the app then asks you if you want to leave them in your camera roll, or if you want to remove (delete) them from the camera roll.
Not a big deal.
Unless you are brain dead like me, and after copying the 2,600 pics to your newly created albums, and then later on (a month later) forget about this app.
This morning, I opened the Apple Photos app, saw the folder called “recently deleted”, and remembered I had moved these 2,600 photos into albums, and decided I could tell the app to now physically delete them. The Apple Photos app asks the question: “do you really want to do this?”
Sure, they are now in albums, I said.
After the Apple app finishes with the delete, I look around for my albums, and then it hits me – the Apple app also deleted my albums too.
I freak out.
Crap. Crap. Crap…
I start searching google on how to recover my two thousand, six hundred, and forty seven photos I had just deleted.
Actually found some windows/mac utilities to do this, after spending more than a few minutes in this google search.
A bit pricy – a couple I saw were free downloads and a couple were selling for $60-80.
Then I read that they only work on older iPhones / iPads, BEFORE Apple changed their software to prevent stuff like this from being recovered (due to security / privacy concerns, etc.)
Crap, double crap.
I know I’ve probably confused you, since it’s pretty obvious I’m confused.
Or, maybe my confusion is due to my forgetting I had used this second app for the album creation, etc.
I slowly remember that I had bought this second app and that was where my albums are stored.
I open up the “album” app…
Crisis averted – they are all there, all 2,600 pics across ~5-10 albums.
Yea!
[its the little things that make me happy.]
And, how’s your day going?
