What to Do If You Accidentally Deleted Photos From Your Phone
It happens. You absentmindedly scan your photos, enjoying a great view or a summer drink . You click around – and then you realize you’ve accidentally deleted a ton of photos on your device. You panic. Have you just lost your precious memories forever?
While a Lifehacker reader did not send us this question directly, we stumbled upon it on the HotTo Reddit forum and thought it was worth exploring to save a day of stress (and crazy internet searches for “photo recovery app”). …
Reddit user fire_arms writes :
“I cry, I just deleted all my pregnancy photos and the video in which I told my husband that I got pregnant by accident. there must be a way to get them back? I have a Samsung J6 “
It’s easy on iOS . If you delete a photo (or all of your photos), they will not disappear forever the moment you click on the trash can icon. Scroll through your albums in Photos. The very last one you should see – in the main Albums list, not in the secondary My Albums list – is an album called Recently Deleted. You cannot miss this. It has a boring gray trash can icon.
Tap this and you can restore anything you accidentally deleted. Your iPhone will keep the deleted photos for about a month. the dates shown in the photos are countdowns. When they reach zero, the photos are automatically deleted from your device permanently.
The same is true for any photos you delete in iCloud . They didn’t disappear forever – at least not initially. Just restore them from the Recently Deleted folder. TA-dah.
A similar deal for Android users. First, there is no reason why you shouldn’t automatically back up all your photos to Google Photos. If it’s not already installed on your Android device, find it , install it , and set it to automatically back up and sync your device’s photos to the Google cloud.
Google Photos makes it very easy to recover deleted images. If you’ve ever accidentally erased something from your phone (via Google Photos), there is an easy way to recover it. Just open the Google Photos app, click on the hamburger icon, click on Trash, click Recover and select any photos you want tobring back from the dead . If you delete the image in another photo app, just go to Google Photos, find the image, and download it to your device.
If you deleted your photos before setting up Google Photos, Reddit user td888 recommends the free Android DiskDigger photo recovery app, which seems to have helped fix the original fire_arms issue. Install this as soon as you notice your accidental deletion. The app scans your device’s cache and thumbnails for recently deleted photos and, if it detects what you just deleted, gives you the option to recover your photos. You may not be as thrilled with the results as DiskDigger points out, but it’s better than nothing:
“If you use the app on a non-rooted device, it will most likely restore lower resolution versions of your photos. This is a limitation that cannot be avoided. To restore the original photos in full resolution, you must have root access installed on your device . “
Do you have technical issues that are keeping you awake at night? Tired of searching and troubleshooting Windows or Mac issues? Looking for advice on applications, browser extensions, or utilities that you can use to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below, or better yet, write to david.murphy@lifehacker.com .