Trash & restoring deleted items
Deleting a page or a book does not destroy it straight away. It moves to the Trash, where it can be restored for 30 days. After that it is permanently deleted, automatically.
What happens when you delete a page
The page disappears from the book immediately — it leaves the page order, the remaining pages renumber to close the gap, and the book’s page count goes down. Nobody in your family will see it any more. Nothing is actually erased yet: the image, caption, transcript, comments and everything else are held so the page can be put back.
Restoring something
Open Trash from the menu. Each item shows what it was, which book it came from, who deleted it and when, and how many days remain before it is permanently deleted. Click Restore to bring it back.
A restored page returns to the position it was deleted from where possible. If pages were added, reordered, or deleted while it sat in the trash, that exact slot may no longer exist — the page then comes back as close to it as the book now allows. Everything attached to the page comes back with it.
If a page’s whole book is also in the trash, restore the book first. Restoring a page into a deleted book would put it somewhere nobody can see, and the book’s own deletion would remove it again.
Deleting something before the 30 days are up
Click Delete permanently on an item in the trash. You will be asked to confirm, and for a book you will be asked to type its short name. This cannot be undone.
Once permanent deletion has actually started, Restore stops working for that item, even if the deletion is still finishing or has to retry. That is deliberate: by then some of the stored images may already be gone, so putting the item back would give you an incomplete copy while telling you it was recovered.
Permanent deletion removes the stored images and audio as well as the database records, and clears any face data the page contributed from the face-recognition service. Occasionally one of those stores is temporarily unreachable; when that happens nothing is deleted at all and the app says so, then retries on its own. It never reports success over a partial deletion.
After 30 days
Anything still in the trash is permanently deleted automatically. You do not need to empty it, and there is no way to extend the window.
Who can do what
- Pages — family administrators can delete, restore, and permanently delete.
- Books — only the product operator can delete or restore a whole book. Administrators can see a deleted book in the trash and when it will be removed, but cannot act on it.
- Organizers and commenters do not have access to the trash.
What is not covered by the trash
Comments, suggestions, people, and individual audio recordings have their own removal behaviour and do not appear here. Photo enhancements you reject are hidden rather than deleted, and stay available for comparison.