iOS 18 will help you recover lost photos and videos

Restore or delete, it’s your choice

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iOS 18is now in public beta, so if you’ve been waiting to jump on board, now might be the time, although you may still prefer to wait for the finished release. In any case, this latest version of the iOS 18 beta has some new features in it – including a handy way to recover photos.

MacRumorshas spotted that this beta adds a ‘Recovered’ album to the Utilities section of the Photos app, and this album will house any photos or videos found on your iPhone that aren’t part of your photo library.

You might expect all the images on your device to be in your main photo library, but whether through database corruption, third-party apps failing to properly save an image or video to the photo library, or other issues, sometimes photos and videos can get stuck in limbo.

It’s those images that this folder is for, and you’ll be given the option to restore or delete any images or videos that appear in your Recovered album. Note, however, that you’ll only see this album if there are photos or videos on your device that aren’t already in your photo library – if there’s nothing to recover then the Recovered album won’t be present.

Find lost photos and keep deleted ones gone

The emergence of this Recovered album feature might have been prompted bya database corruption issue in iOS 17.5, which caused previously deleted photos to resurface for some users. With this new album, it’s likely that any repeat of that bug would see the images appear in the Recovered album, rather than in your main photo library – so, as well as helping you to recover lost photos, the feature could also ensure that any photos you delete stay deleted.

If you’d like to give this feature a try for yourself, you can check out our guide onhow to download the iOS 18 public beta. But note that this still isn’t a finished or stable release, so we’d recommend waiting until the final release, which will likely land in September.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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