Where have my photos gone after I have signed out?

[iMore Question]

My parents bought a new iPad and wanted to clear some space from their old one so signed out of their iCloud account on the old iPad. All the photos were on iCloud on the computer so seemed to be safe. However once I had signed out all the photos on the iCloud and other iPads started disappearing. I have only managed to stop them from deleting by putting the old iPad onto flight mode. So far a lot of albums have been deleted and these are very precious as images from their travels.

Please help if you can as I would hate for them to lose them all.

 

[Ledsteplin]

Other iPads? How many iPads were on the same iCloud account? How do you sign out photos? What, exactly, did you do? I really don't follow you.

 

[Bigeric23]

As far as I know, signing out of iCloud will not remove any photos from your device.

 

[snezzer]

My parents have 2 iPads and 2 iPhones connected to the iCloud account. They bought a new (3rd) iPad to replace one that was old. The photos must have been taken from the old iPad and looked to be uploaded to the iCloud but have disappeared now I have signed out of iCloud on the old iPad.

Thank you for replying to my question

 

[Ledsteplin]

First, all those devices should not be on the same iCloud account. Your parents should have separate iCloud accounts. Each with the phone and iPad on the same account. But not all 4 devices. One needs to create their own account. As far as the photos go, I'm not sure what you did or what you see. If you deleted photos from the devices, then did an iCloud back up, they may be gone. Were they backed up to iTunes? You can't "sign out" of photos. You can sign out of iCloud. But the photos would still be there.

 

[snezzer]

Their iCloud has 4 devices attached to it.

I went to settings - iCloud - sign out. When I then checked the photo albums on the different devices many of them had disappeared and are now empty. I've logged in to iCloud on a computer and there are just empty folders with different names. I can't understand how signing out of an account on one iPad could have deleted everything across all devices. It says that the last back up was 2 days ago so it can't have done that. I don't think they were backed up to iTunes.

Thank you for taking the time to help with this.