You can get back every photo you ever "permanently deleted" from your iPhone. Claude is a f*cking treasure...
Claude Code found years of them sitting in a hidden folder on my laptop.
I plugged my iPhone into my laptop to run a backup. I had Claude Code doing a security check at the same time, and it flagged something I wasn't looking for: a directory called PhotoData/Thumbnails, inside my old iPhone backups.
Thousands of files. Photos, videos, screenshots, and a lot of them were things I had deleted.
Photos from a couple of years ago. Screenshots I took and deleted a few seconds later. Stuff I went into Recently Deleted and cleared. Some of it was still sitting there.
What I found in there:
- old screenshots of banking apps
- photos I deleted right after taking them
- random pictures I didn't want on my phone anymore
- a few things I specifically remember deleting more than once
Every time you back up your iPhone to a computer, it saves a full copy of your camera roll, thumbnails included. When you delete a photo on the phone later, that copy stays on the computer. Mine went back years, and none of the backups were encrypted.
I checked which apps on my Mac had Full Disk Access. There were more than I expected, including apps I downloaded a long time ago and forgot about. Any of them could open an unencrypted backup.
I deleted the old backups, turned on "Encrypt local backup" and removed access from most of those apps.
The prompt I used is below. It doesn't take long if you already have a backup.
How many apps on your laptop have Full Disk Access right now?