It often happens that photos disappear somewhere. For example, you decided to clean the photo album in your smartphone and accidentally deleted a screenshot showing you hit a jackpot at a South African online casino. Or you had to do a factory reset, but you forgot to save the pictures. How do you avoid all this and can you recover deleted photos?
Using Your Google Account to Help You Recover Photos
If your phone was set to automatically sync and upload photos to Google Photos, it’s easy to recover them.
If so, your photos will be moved to the “Trash” of the cloud storage service from Google, and will remain there for 60 days, until the trash is completely emptied if you uploaded them to the cloud; and 30 days if they are stored only on the device.
To find the Recycle Bin, you need to go to the Google Photos app and click the “Recycle Bin” tab in the Library.
If you can’t find the “Trash” in the Google Photos app on your phone, just go to photos.google.com, sign in to your Google account and find the trash on the left panel, then restore your lost photos.
Restore From Backup
Your Android phone may also be set up to back up your photos, apps, and all important data to your smartphone manufacturer’s cloud storage or Google Drive. Your smartphone usually asks about this when you first set it up.
If you reset to factory settings or your phone was reflashed at a service for some reason, a backup is your salvation. To restore photos and apps, go to the account settings associated with the smartphone manufacturer and select “Restore from backup”.
If you haven’t logged into any such account and have only used the standard Google tools and services on your smartphone, you can only restore photos from a backup if the photos and videos have been synced with Google Photos, which brings us back one step higher.
To check if there are any backups on Google Drive, go to drive.google.com under “Storage” – “Backups”. But if you haven’t synced photos before, these copies will only contain some settings and app data.
Restore Using Root Rights
This method is recommended only for advanced users who know what Root access is and how to get it. If you don’t know how to do it, or this is the first time you see the word Root, it’s better not to experiment.
But if your phone already has Root access, you can download the Disk Drill app for Mac or Windows. This is one of the most popular solutions for recovering lost data.
When you connect your smartphone to your PC, you’ll need to enable USB debugging. You can then scan your Android device through Disk Drill, giving it all the requested permissions, and recover your lost photos.
The chance of recovering photos is increased if you haven’t taken or saved anything to your smartphone after deleting photos or resetting to factory settings. If the memory of the device or external storage is overwritten with new data, the chances of recovering lost pictures are rapidly reduced.
