When you clean up the gallery on your smartphone, it can always happen that you delete the wrong photos. Fortunately, in many cases, you can easily retrieve them. We will explain how.
Recover Deleted Photos on Android
The storage of your Android smartphone can get full in no time if you take or receive a lot of photos and videos. It is therefore not wrong to empty your gallery every now and then and delete unnecessary files. Did you accidentally delete that one nice photo with your grandma or that video of your puppy? Don’t worry, you can quickly retrieve it with the steps below.
Google Photos
Google Photos is the default gallery app on many Android smartphones, but not on all brands. We, therefore, recommend that you download the app if you don’t have it yet because with Google Photos, you can easily view all photos and videos and automatically make backups to Google Drive.
To see deleted photos in the Google Photos app, go to the ‘Library’ heading at the bottom of the screen. Then select ‘Trash’ and choose the photo you want to retrieve. Click ‘Restore’ and then ‘Allow’. The photo will then return to its original location in your gallery.
If you have automatic backup enabled, you have 60 days to retrieve your photo or video before it is deleted. If you don’t have a backup, this is only 30 days. Therefore, make sure you don’t wait too long.
Samsung Gallery
Anyone who uses a Samsung smartphone has the Samsung Gallery app as standard to view photos and videos. Fortunately, recovering deleted photos is not difficult here either.
Open the Gallery app on your Samsung phone and select the three lines at the bottom. Then click ‘Trash’ and locate the photos you want to get back. Select these snapshots and click ‘Recover’. The image is now back among your old photos and videos in the Gallery app.
Final is (almost always) final
In many cases, your beloved (and accidentally deleted) photos and videos are easy to retrieve from a photo gallery’s trash bin. This only works if the documents have been deleted once. If you also delete the photos or videos from the trash, then according to Google, they are permanently gone and the Photos app offers no way to recover them.
Fortunately, there are also third-party apps that can help you recover permanently deleted photos. Examples of these apps are DiskDigger, DigDeep Image Recoveryand Dumpster. These apps scan your storage for deleted files, even if they are ‘permanently’ deleted. With a bit of luck, you will find your favorite pictures again.