iOS 18 will help you recover lost and damaged photos

Apple’s next major software update for iPhones, iOS 18, was announced earlier this year at WWDC 2024. However, with the new update still in beta, we have been learning about a lot of the smaller stuff that will be a part of iOS 18 when the update finally comes to stable users.

One of these newer features to come to light is the new ‘Recovered’ album in the Photos app, which lets you recover older photos that were lost or damaged.

iOS 18 Recovered photos feature: What’s new?

The new Recovered section will be available for users of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, as well as the new macOS Sequoia update. The functioning of the feature remains the same on all three platforms, though.

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When you boot into the iOS 18, iPadOS 18 or macOS Sequoia for the first time after updating your device, your iPhone, iPad or Mac will search for any older media files that can be recovered. These include both photos and videos. The recovered files will then show up under the Utilities section of the Photos app.

The feature shows up not long after a bug in iOS 17.5 caused many iPhone users to randomly find images in the Photos app that they thought they had deleted. Apple had said that the issue was a rare one that affected “photos that experienced database corruption.”

Note that the new ‘Recovered’ section is different from the ‘Recently Deleted’ section (also in the Photos app), where you will only find media files that you have deleted yourself. The Recovered section is for files that were damaged, like when moving from one iPhone to another.

We still do not know how long items will stay in the Recovered album, or if they will have a set time limit at all. Items in the Recently Deleted section, for instance, are available there only for 30 days, after which they will be permanently deleted.

It remains to be seen when we will get a stable version for iOS 18, which would bring this feature, along with others like home screen editing and Apple Intelligence to our devices. For now, the only way to use these new iOS 18 features is to switch to the beta channel. However, if you’re using your iPhone as your daily driver, we would advise against it due to the possibility of bugs affecting your day-to-day experience.