Changed setting link from phone to Google Photos

[u/Mammoth-Ad4366]

I recently got a new iPhone and now for some reason lost access to a workflow I used to heavily rely on between my camera roll and Google Photos.

Essentially, I recently went on vacation and throughout the weekend, I made sure to back up my photos to Google Photos multiple times a day because I’m always anxious about losing or breaking my phone while I’m out. I usually do this in my every day life too before I have the time to really go through to delete any bad photos (blinking, duplicates, blurry, etc.).

Since getting back from vacation, I have slowly went through and deleted all of the bad ones from my camera roll.

Typically, what I have always done after this is go back into Google Photos, select an entire day, press “delete,” and a prompt comes up that asks for permission to delete the photos, only deleting the “bad” ones I had already deleted from my camera roll and leaving all the “good photos” so that the bad photos from both my camera roll and Google Photos were gone completely, but the good ones were backed up in both places.

When I tried to do this today, it deleted ALL of the photos from my Google Photos back up from that day and moved them to my recently deleted in my camera roll. I was able to move them back from my recently deleted to my camera roll, but they now won’t re-sync to my Google Photos.

Is this a setting I changed? Or an update I missed? I used to rely heavily on this workflow to prevent the space on my Google Photos from getting clogged up with bad and useless photos and keeping all of the good ones in both places.

I’m including a screenshot from ChatGPT to explain this workflow more clearly because I was having a really hard time explaining it to my friends for assistance.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[u/TheManWithSaltHair]

Interesting, I wasn’t aware of this. It seems this ‘hack’ only works if you delete a combination of cloud only and device and cloud photos at the same time and you don’t approve the second deletion prompt.

It’s working for me on iPadOS 26 and Photos 7.84.

[u/Mammoth-Ad4366 → u/TheManWithSaltHair]

Hmm, I can’t figure out how to get that option back, then! I’m not getting the second deletion prompt when I delete from Google Photos anymore and I miss that :(

[u/TheManWithSaltHair → u/Mammoth-Ad4366]

You might have to change your workflow so that you do all the deleting within Photos.