I'm curious about this. It's 'not allowed' explicitly by the judge? Can the employee be charged with 'evidence tampering' even if the judge didn't issue any order that explicitly prohibits the employee from deleting their files?
I think the concern is that the employer could be accused of destroying relevant evidence in that case. If I’ve understood the tweets and the Wikipedia article on e-discovery correctly, these photos went through the preservation phase but likely were not actually handed over to the other party since relevance is a factor before that happens.