Potential to lose all your photos forever! Be aware of Optimise iPhone Storage!

iCloud Photos is mainly a synchronization service. If you delete photos from any device synced with iCloud Photos, or from iCloud itself, that is a request to delete them everywhere.

"Optimize iPhone Storage" lets the system automatically free up local storage on your device – but the system still wants to store some version of each photo on all of the devices synchronized with Cloud.

When you are using iCloud Photos, iCloud does act as a sort of backup, in the sense that if

• You forget your passcode, and have to erase the phone to get back in,
• Your phone falls into the street and is run over by a truck, or
• Some such other catastrophe that does not involve the deliberate erasure of photos occurs

you can use the full-size copies of photos that have made it to iCloud to load a reset or replacement device.

But it's not an archive service where you can store some photos only on the phone, some photos only in iCloud, etc. Synchronized means synchronized (modulo the "optimize" thing).

You may want to contact Apple Support again and ask them to help to restore your iCloud Photos from their backups, while they still have a backup.

Explain, that you misunderstood how iCloud Photos is working and that it is an emergency and you have lost all photos from iCloud.

Perhaps Apple can still help.

There is a warning, when you delete photos from iCloud, that they will be deleted from all devices, but it could be phrased more clearly. I just tested again and tried to delete a photo from my iCloud Photos Library at www.icloud.com and got this warning (in German):

"Delete one object from all your devices?

This object will be deleted on all your devices from iCloud Photos".

It does not say, that the downloaded shadow copies on the devices will be removed as well from all devices. This could be made clearer.

So you had:

iCloud Photos "Sync this iPhone" function turned on.

Ok. Then you

deleted all my photos from iCloud photos and also from the "Recently Deleted" folder.

and you're surprised that this deletion was then synced to the Phone? Isn't that exactly what you set it up to do?

I have some sympathy. I don't use iCloud or Photos to manage my pictures because, in my opinion, the combination is poorly documented and, as you have found, out of the user's control by default with inadequate warnings about the consequences of one's choices. There are posts like yours regularly hereabouts.

iCloud is a primarily a synchronization service. For the standard, default configs it's not handy extra storage and not a backup except for some of your iDevice data - but even this is so arcane and problem-prone as to make it useless as backup. If you delete synched files anywhere then they disappear from everywhere they are synched to. For many this is obvious behaviour but it's different from synch services I used in the 90s when there were options to make one device the master data source - which could fix many of the problems seen with iCloud synch. The warnings are obviously not severe enough otherwise people wouldn't find themselves in the position you're in. There's a 30-day delete bin on iCloud.

Get a backup of your photos - and all your other data. Find out how to download copies of your photo orignals - in itself fraught with difficulty - and how to do regular backups so you don't find yourself in this position again.

david_hun wrote: … And I was not notified by the consequences it can cause on my iphone.

Right! They should provide some sort of warning!

Maybe like this?

thats exactly how iCloud sync works. Whatever you do on one device or in iCloud is reflected on all devices. You also received a warning before permanently deleting the photos.