A photo can linger in Trash, in a separate cloud backup or on a friend’s phone long after you’ve removed it from your gallery.
First stop: the trash
In Apple Photos, deleted photos stay in the Recently Deleted album for 30 days. Google Photos also keeps deleted photos in Trash for 30 days. Both services let you recover photos during this period or permanently delete them sooner.
It's a useful safety net, especially when you've accidentally deleted a photo you wanted to keep. But what if you actually wanted that photo gone?
Second stop: the cloud
If cloud backup is on, your photos are stored online too. When you delete a photo from Google Photos, that deletion usually syncs across your connected devices.
If you also sent the photo through Gmail or uploaded it to Google Drive, Blogger or YouTube, you’ll need to remove those copies separately.
Third stop: someone else's phone
Then there are the copies you don't have control over.
Maybe you sent the photo to a group chat, a friend saved it, or someone downloaded it from a shared album.
Even if you delete your photo, their copy is still there.
Last Stop: the deletion queue
Even after you permanently delete a photo, removing it from a company's storage systems can take longer.
According to Google's data-retention policy, complete deletion from its servers generally takes around two months. Data may remain in encrypted backups for up to six months, and certain information can be retained longer for legal or security reasons.
Apple's iCloud terms don't specify an exact timeline for removing every underlying copy after you permanently delete a photo.
You hit delete, but you may never know exactly when your photos are gone for good.
How Ente handles deletion
At Ente, deleted photos stay in Trash for 30 days in case you change your mind. After that, they're queued for deletion. Once processed, we remove the stored file and the information needed to locate and decrypt it.
Like Google and Apple, we explain how deletion works. But we go a step further by making our apps and server code open source, so anyone can inspect how the process is implemented.
Here's how Ente deletes your data.
This applies to your copies stored with Ente. It doesn't cover copies someone else has downloaded or saved to their own Ente library.