Reddit user:

Last night I accidentally deleted my entire library of photos, many of which are (obviously) very important to me.

What follows is a long slow car crash, a combination of misunderstanding where your original photos are stored and, perhaps, ignoring some error messages that would have prevented this situation.

I post this, not to harp on the confusing language of iCloud (it can be confusing, no doubt), but to point out how this user got their photos back.

First, here’s how deleted the photos were:

After freeing up space by deleting my entire photo library on the Macbook, I look at my phone and realize it’s all deleted there as well. Of course, I had also gone to the “recently deleted” and removed all of them because I was trying to free the space on the Mac.

Yup. Those photos are deleted. A backup of your Mac might help here, but set that aside for now.

I called Apple immediately, and was quickly escalated to something along the lines of a “media specialist for iPhoto and iTunes” – honestly it was a very long title, but something like that. He said they have something called “the magic button” which is a level of iCloud that regular users can’t see. The iCloud file recover function didn’t work for me either btw, forgot to mention that.

A magic button you say! First time I’ve heard of this. Interesting.

After he pressed this “magic button”, all the photos came back into my recently deleted section, and I just restored them back to the library.

That’s worth noting. Me, I keep all my original pictures and music on my Mac, then back up that Mac religiously. I have my original music/photo libraries backed up off site, too.