my kid deleted some photos from their profile recently and i’d really like to see what they looked like. has anyone found a way to recover or view those through the phone or something?
Yeah this comes up a lot — short answer is once they’re deleted from Instagram, they’re pretty much gone unless Instagram itself still has them cached somewhere.
The most realistic option is checking if your kid uses Google Photos or iCloud auto-backup — a lot of kids don’t realize their camera roll backs up everything automatically, so the original photo might still be sitting there if they took it on the phone first.
Honestly though, if something specific triggered your concern, just having a direct conversation or checking what monitoring app you have set up going forward (like Bark or Qustodio) is more useful than chasing deleted stuff — those tools catch things in real-time so you’re not always playing detective after the fact.