Data Recovery
Recover Deleted Facebook Photos, Even Years Ago
Meta Facebook continues to reign as the platform for users to connect with friends or family, get news and join communities..., in this new year 2025. You might have been a Facebook user since its launch in 2004 and uploaded countless photos that you even don’t have a backup now. But what if you’ve deleted some photos, or a post that contained a precious photo, even delete your account, and want to get them back?
Don’t be panic, not all the photos will be permanently deleted from your Facebook account, it is still possible to recover, even those Facebook photos from years ago. In this guide, we will look at several ways to recover deleted Facebook photos on Windows & Mac computer, and on iPhone & Android.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Windows and Mac
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Free Download macOS 10.15 or later It depends on how do you delete the photos on Facebook.
If you delete the photos from Profile > Your Photos or Albums, yes, the Facebook photos will be permanently deleted, even the post that includes the photos will be permanently deleted as well.
If the Facebook photos are originally uploaded in a post and you delete the post, the photos won’t be permanently delete, they are moved to Trash and will be kept there for 30 days, you can restore the post to recover the Facebook photos within 30 days.
If you delete your Facebook account, things will be different. There are 2 kinds of Facebook account cancellation: temporarily deactivate and permanently deactivate.
For temporarily deactivated account, just log in to reactivate your account and regain your access to the Facebook photos; for permanently deleted account, you can cancel the deletion within 30 days since you deleted the account, or you can ask help from Facebook photos to restore the photos after 30 days since the deletion, because it may take up to 90 days for Meta to completely delete all the post and photos from your Facebook account.
Surely, you can.
According to part 1, for posts or photos that are moved to Trash, we can easily restore them to Profile. To regain access to photos in a deactivated or deleted account, we can cancel the deletions or ask for Facebook support. While for permanently deleted Facebook photos you’ve deleted in Profile or Albums, as long as we have a backup, or once saved a copy on your device (even it is deleted now), we are able to recover too.
It is straightforward to recover deleted photos in Facebook app or from the web version, without using any 3rd party software. And this is practically useful when the photos are just recently deleted. Let’s check out how.
Facebook employs a policy to auto delete photos after a span of 30 days from its Trash folder, if you have moved the photos or posts containing the photos to Trash and not exceeding 30 days, you should check the Trash folder first to restore:
Facebook allows users to archive all the information and activity in an account, then download or transfer the data to a selected location. This includes posts, messages, photos, live videos, short videos, stories, notes, profile information, data logs and so on. If you have archived this information, even if you delete a Facebook photo later, it is still possible to recover, because Facebook keeps the archive for 4 days since it was created, and the backup of the deleted Facebook photo is still available.
Facebook archive file will come with a prefix facebook-, you may have downloaded the archive to your device before, search the zip file first, so you don’t have to re-download it. If not, follow these steps to recover your Facebook photos.
Tips: If you want to archive and back up your Facebook posts, media or activities to avoid data loss, here is the process:
If you’ve temporarily or permanently deleted your Facebook account, but still within 30 days since the deletion, you can cancel the account deletion to regain access to the photos:
If it has been more than 30 days since the account deletion, but not exceeding 90 days, you can drop a message to Facebook official account and seek professional suggestions, because it takes up to 90 days for Facebook to erase your information from its server.
Deleted photos not available in Facebook Trash bin? Luckily, for the reason that we often upload photos to Facebook from our computer or mobile device, there may be a backup for the deleted photos. Even though you don’t keep the backup any more, we still have solutions to make the retrieval feasible.
For Windows and Mac users, if you’ve deleted the Facebook photos from your device permanently, or you deleted them years ago and you don’t know where to restore, just use a professional data recovery program to scan thoroughly on your device and dig deep into every corner to get the files back, for example, Cisdem Data Recovery.
There are several key reasons why Cisdem Data Recovery is our favorite Facebook photo recovery software. It can restore nearly all kinds of image format (JPG/JPEG, TIFF/TIF, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, CRW, CR2, NEF, SVG, DWG, etc.), from every kind of device, including Windows PC, Mac, SD Card, Memory Card, USB, HDD, SSD, Fusion Drive, Digital Camera, media player, etc. Not only can Cisdem recover deleted, formatted and lost photos, it can also repair corrupted images in JPG, PNG and other formats.
In addition to photo-friendly features, Cisdem offers impressive tools, it can load search record to resume previous recovery work, it repairs videos in batch, it creates drive backup image to recover files from drive image, it filters and preview files, it repairs documents like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and it can save recovered files to local drive, or cloud platforms like DropBox, OneDrive, pCloud, Box.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.15 or later 
If you have a habit of backing up files on Windows or Mac using the built-in utilities, it will be much easier to recover a deleted photo from Facebook.
In the case that you use File History to back up the files on your Windows PC to an external storage device, you can restore the deleted Facebook photos as follows:
On a Mac, users can use Time Machine to backup and restore files, as long as they have enabled and set up the backup. Here are the steps for Facebook photos recovery on Mac with backup:
Or if you have backed up files to cloud storage platforms like iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or others, you can log in and transfer the photos to a device as you like, if you cannot locate the files, don’t forget to check the Trash folder and restore.
It is much likely that you will use Facebook app on a mobile device, like iPhone or Android, even though you have deleted the photos from Facebook, there may be a copy of the photo in your Photos app or gallery. In the case that you cannot restore the photos from recently deleted folder on your phone, we also have advanced solutions to retrieve your photos.
If you upload photos to Facebook on an iPhone or Android phone, but cannot find them in the photos app, your best hope is to check the recently deleted folder.
For iPhone Users
Open Photos app, go to Albums > Other Albums > Recently Deleted. 
Select the deleted photos by tapping on them, Tap Recover. 
For Android Users
What if you cannot find the deleted Facebook photos on iPhone or Android phone? Don’t worry, deleted files will remain on the phone or the memory card until they get overwritten by new data. As soon as you realize you've deleted the photos, you should use a professional data recovery program to recover deleted files from iPhone or Android phone.
FoneLab is one of the most popular mobile phone Recovery applications out there, it supports both iOS and Android devices. It is capable of recovering deleted items (messages, photos, contacts, call history, notes, voice memos, calendar, etc.) from your mobile device or a backup, under all data loss situations. The recovery process is streamlined: connect > scan >recover.
For iPhone users, you should download and install FoneLab iPhone Data Recovery; for Android users, you should download and install FoneLab Android Data Recovery.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.10 or later 
There are 2 ways to permanently delete a Facebook photo.
Method 1:
Method 2:
Because Facebook has a copy of your Facebook information and files on its server, even though you’ve deleted the photos from your Facebook account, the copies are still available in Facebook backup storage, therefore, they are still viewable.
But why Facebook keeps this in its backup system? There might be cases that you mistakenly delete a post or photo but want to recover, or you delete your account but want to re-activate, or other data loss event. Then Facebook backup will come to rescue your data. This is also why you can restore a post or cancel account deletion within 30 days since the deletion. Even you’ve permanently deleted your account, Facebook won’t delete all your information, and it takes up to 90 days to completely remove them from the server.
There is no free app that is designed to recover deleted photos directly from Facebook, because Facebook has strict rules and guidelines to protect users’ privacy. But if you once backed up the photos on your computer, and it is not long ago, PhotoRec or Recuva is a good choice to recover your Facebook photos for free. However, the recovery rate of free tools is generally lower than those paid ones.
We’ve listed several methods to recover deleted photos from Facebook, no matter they were deleted years ago or permanently deleted, we can use backup or professional tools to retrieve the deleted items. A dedicated data recovery app makes file recovery easier and it just runs quietly on your device to dig out the deleted items fast. Not backing up data is one of the common reasons to make file recovery complicated, therefore, always back up files to external device or cloud.
Zoey shows a great interest in what she does. Although not long with Cisdem, she has possessed a professional understanding of data recovery.
