Top 5 Best Methods To Recover Deleted Photos From Android

Are you unable to find your farewell photos? Do you doubt you’ve deleted them mistakenly? If yes, here’s how to recover deleted photos from Android. 

We all love capturing beautiful moments of our life for the future. Maybe you recently attended your college farewell or met some amazing folks after a long break. Clicking photos is a must! 

However, the limited Android internal storage is somewhat bothersome. And if you happen to be short of space, you’d have to get some photos to free some valuable space. 

If you feel like you have deleted some important photos in this process, don’t worry! Here’s a detailed guide on how to recover deleted photos from Android. So, let’s start. 

Why Do You Lose Your Photos?

If your phone’s internal storage is nearly full, the first thing you, in fact, all of us will do is delete the unwanted photos and videos from the device. This is because these unwanted photos often eat up a huge chunk of the available storage space that, if freed, can be used for other purposes. 

And in a hurry, you might not take a closer look at the photos you’re deleting. And hence, you end up deleting the important photos by mistake. Other than this, the following are some other situations due to which you lose your photos. 

• Due to ROM flash, photos disappear from the gallery app. 
• There is some sort of malicious malware attack on your device.
• Rooting of your device or factory reset.
• Your device has been internally damaged. 

There can be other reasons as well, but the above ones are the most common.

How To Avoid Losing Your Photos On An Android Smartphone? 

Now that we’ve discussed the circumstances that might lead to the loss of your important photos, let’s understand some ways to avoid losing them on an Android or any device. 

There is no 100% guarantee that your photos will be recovered even by trying every hack and way. Even if you’re using third-party applications to recover deleted photos from an Android phone, there’s still some possibility that they won’t be recovered. 

Therefore, it’s always important to avoid losing your photos in the first place, so you won’t have to recover them at all. This can be done by using the following ways. 

• Back-Up Your Android Phone

There is no debate on how much backing up your phone and its valuable data is important. If you’ve backed up your Android phone, it won’t only help in recovering the photos or videos but all of your files and data on the phone can be recovered as well. All this with a single tap!

In case you’re considering buying a new phone in that case as well, backing up can be helpful. As you don’t have to waste your time. You can easily transfer the data from the backup. 

• Clear The Cached Images From Your Gallery

If you’re facing an issue where photos aren’t opening in the gallery, the reason behind this could be the Android OS isn’t generating the thumbnails correctly. 

This can be easily solved in two ways. Firstly, you can try deleting the thumbnail files from the DCIM folder. Secondly, you can use disk space cleaners to solve this issue. 

• Clean Up Your Storage Space

At times, when your phone lacks enough proper storage space, it might not display the photos properly. Therefore, if at any point, you notice that photos from the gallery start disappearing or not getting saved, as usual, you’d always check the storage space available. If it’s only a few megabytes (MB), then, the best thing to do is clean up some storage. 

• Upload Photos To The Cloud

There are several cloud storage platforms compatible with Android handsets. Hence, you can go ahead with the best cloud backup service per your convenience to save or store the photos instead of internally storing them. With this, you can easily transfer or recover deleted photos from your Android phone or anything that you have saved from anywhere and on any phone/device.

• Be As Careful As You Can

This is the ultimate hack. You’d always be careful while deleting or removing photos from your phone. As there is no in-built recycle bin installed on most Android models, there is never a full guarantee of recovering missing photos. 

Lastly, just consider twice before selecting any picture to delete. 

1. How To Recover Deleted Photos From Android? 

In this section, we’ll be discussing some of the most common and easiest ways by which you can recover deleted photos from Android.

• Recover The Deleted Pictures From the Trash Folder

This should be the first hack you’d try to recover the photos if your phone has a trash folder (that is rare in most Android devices though.) If your device has one, just open it and look for the deleted photos you wish to recover. 

You can follow these steps to access your trash folder. 

• Open your phone’s Gallery app. 
• Tap on the three horizontal lines at the bottom-right corner of the screen. In some of the Android versions, you need to tap on the three vertical dots on the top-right corner of the screen.
• Tap on the Trash option. Photos you need to recover should be in this folder.
• Find the one you want to recover, and recover it by tapping on the Recover option on the left-bottom corner of the screen.

Note that these trash folders only keep your deleted media for a certain duration. Say, most bins store the recently deleted photos for 30-45 days. After this period, they get permanently deleted. 

If you have deleted photos way too early, say two months ago, they might not be there and have been deleted permanently. 

If that photo is not in your trash folder, you can try the later hacks. 

• Recover Deleted Photos From Google Photos

Google Photos is among the most popular apps from Google. It securely stores all your photos and videos and lets you restore or recover these photos anytime you want.

There are chances that it might automatically remove some of the backed-up photos, but there is no need to panic as these photos can further be recovered with a few steps as explained below. 

• Open the Google Photos application on your phone.
• Select the Deleted photos.
• Tap on the three vertical dots and select the Save to Device option.

You can reconfirm the above action by checking your phone’s main gallery app. The deleted photo must be there. 

• Recover Deleted Photos From the Cloud

You can easily recover the photos saved on the clouds. The most used clouds that support Android phones are:

1. Dropbox

If you’ve activated the Dropbox feature on your phone before deleting photos, you can easily recover all your deleted photos from Dropbox on the fly. Just follow these steps. 

• Open the Dropbox application on your phone
• Navigate to the folder where you have saved the deleted photos. (Such as a camera folder).
• Select the photos you want to recover. 
• Tap on the three vertical dots on the top-right corner of the screen. And tap on the Save to Device option.

2. Microsoft OneDrive

With this cloud, you can save your phone’s storage for some other purposes as it deletes the backed-up photos from your phone’s storage automatically. And to recover the deleted photos, you just have to follow these steps. 

• Open the Microsoft OneDrive app on your phone.
• From the bottom of the menu, select the Photos option.
• Select the photos you want to recover.
• Tap on the three vertical dots on the top-right corner of the screen.
• Tap on the Save option.

3. Recover Deleted Photos From the SD Card

Not many but some of you might be having an SD card for extending the storage of your Android device. With this, you can store a lot more data on your phone than earlier. But with SD cards, there is some risk involved in losing your saved data. If anyhow you damage your SD card, then, it’ll be gone for good, including the photos. 

Therefore, it’s important to understand the method of recovering the data saved on an SD card to avoid this mishappening. The most reliable software used for this is DiskDrill. This will help you in recovering the photos without a cloud or any third-party application. 

Follow these steps to do so. 

• Install the Disk Drill app on your phone.
• Connect the SD card with your PC.
• Click on the Search For The Lost Data option to scan the photos.
• Then, use the preview feature to filter the photos you want to recover.
• Tap on the Recover button by selecting the destination where you want these to be saved.

2. How To Recover A Google Photo And Save It In Your Phone’s Gallery? 

Follow these steps to recover a Google photo and save it in your phone’s gallery. 

• Open the Google Photo app on your phone.
• Tap on the photo you want to save on your phone.
• If you want to share the photo, tap on the Share icon at the bottom of the screen. Otherwise, if you want to save it in your phone’s Gallery, tap on the three vertical dots on the top-right corner of the screen.
• A menu will appear on the screen. Select the Download option from it. In case you won’t see this option, the chances are that this photo is already in your phone’s Gallery.
• Once the download is complete which will hardly take a few seconds, the photos will be saved in your Android Gallery.

3. How to Recover Deleted Photos On An Android Using DiskDigger – The Best Android Recovery Software 

There is a popular third-party data recovery app known as DiskDigger Photo Recovery that is used for recovering deleted photos on an Android phone. Just follow the below steps for this purpose. 

• Open the Google Play Store and install the DiskDigger application. 
• Once it’s installed, open the DiskDigger app.
• Tap on the Give Access option if any pop-up notification appears on the screen asking for access to photos, media, and files.
• Select the Start Basic Scan option on the main screen.
• Once you have filtered the photo you want to recover, tap on the box on the top-left corner of the screen. 
• Then, tap on the Recover option.
• The application will ask you to choose where you want to recover the selected photos. Select the Save The File To An App On Your Device option.
• I’ll further ask you for the folder in which you want to recover the file. You can choose the one you want and then further follow the on-screen instructions. 

Once the above steps are done, the deleted photo will be recovered in the selected folder. 

4. How to Recover Deleted Photos on Android Tablet? 

We’ve discussed pretty much everything that can be done to recover deleted photos from an Android phone. But another question is whether there is any way of recovering the photos on an Android tab. And the answer to this is yes, there is! 

This section of the article will answer this question of yours in detail.

In general, it won’t be wrong to say that Android phones and tabs are similar, except for their size and few functions. There we can use the same method to recover deleted photos on an android tablet. 

Hence, you can use the DiskDrill on your tab for this purpose.  

• Download the Disk Drill.
• Connect your tablet with your Mac via a USB cable and enable USB debugging.
• Launch the DiskDrill app and visit Android devices.
• Give access to all the notifications required for DiskDrill to have access to its storage.
• Next, start the scan for the photo you want to recover by clicking on the Search for Lost Data button. This button won’t be displayed on the screen if your device is not rooted correctly.
• Select the photo you want to recover with help of the DiskDrill preview feature. 
• Click on Recover and choose the destination of your choice where you want to recover the photo.

Hence, your photos will be recovered in the selected destination on your Android tab.

5. How to Find Deleted Photos on Android – Other Methods 

Apart from the aforementioned methods, there are other methods as well that can be used for recovering deleted photos. You’d try these methods if you are desperate enough. These are:

• Go Through Your Emails And Messages

If you’ve sent your pictures via emails to anyone, you can always recover these from those mails. Most of the email services offer unlimited space for all sorts of multimedia Therefore, most of your emails will be available anytime you want. However, this can be a little time-consuming process but if you can successfully recover the deleted photo, it will be worth it. 

• Check Your Social Networks

If not on emails, you might have shared your favorite photos on your social networks. Or even any of your friends or relatives might have shared the exact picture you’re trying to recover on your social network. Again, this can be a little hectic and there’s less possibility that you’ll find the required photo.

• Check Backups Of Your Device

Again, there is no word to describe how useful backup can be in such a situation where you need to recover the photo or any data on your Android phone. For further detail, you can take the help of the above section which has explained the ways of recovering photos from different backups on your device. 

That’s all you can do to recover deleted photos from your Android phone or tablet. And even after trying all of these ways you’re unable to recover the photo, then, it might have been deleted permanently and there’s no chance of restoring it anyhow. 

Conclusion

So, here you go. These were the top tried and tested ways/hacks to recover deleted photos from an Android. And in most cases, one of them will work for you, but there is a minor possibility that it might not recover. Hence, as mentioned above, try avoiding losing or deleting the important photos from your phone. 

For this, backing up is the most convenient option as it will be helpful if you frequently change your phones. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)