As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you, and that’s never become more true than it has in the last several years. The rise of the smartphone has meant that everyone is always connected, everywhere they go, but more importantly, it also means everyone always has a quality camera they can use to shoot photos and videos to their heart’s content. Early camera technology on smartphones and cell phones was poor to say the least, but starting with Apple’s iPhone 4 in 2010, a new focus on camera technology became one of the most important reasons to pick up a smartphone. In the eight years since the launch of the iPhone 4, cameras have gone from good to great, on their way to replace the need for even DSLRs for the majority of amateur photographers. There’s no reason to carry a large camera on your shoulder anymore when you can use the phone you keep in your pocket to take some amazing photos. Devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and, perhaps most prominently, the Google Pixel 2 have raised the bar for current cameras on smartphones, taking it from good to great, and marking the future of photography with features like true HDR (high-dynamic range) and portrait mode.
Of course, your smartphone only has so much storage. Standard cameras allow you to switch out memory cards on the fly, giving you nearly unlimited storage so long as you have enough memory cards to satisfy your photo needs. Though some Android devices, including the previously-mentioned Note 8, have microSD card slots for additional storage, switching out memory cards on Android devices can be a real pain. More importantly, phones like the Pixel 2 don’t include any sort of SD card slot, which means you might need to conserve on space when taking photos. While there are plenty of options for saving your images, from uploading to the cloud to transferring your photos to a PC, sometimes you have to simply remove photos from your device in order to properly capture more photos or videos.
Unfortunately, in your haste to delete content, you can often accidentally delete photos or videos you had no actual intention of removing from your phone. Removing content you meant to keep on your device is never a pleasing feeling, and can even lead to losing some treasured memories if you haven’t already backed up your files. We can’t promise that your already-deleted files can be saved—though there are a few options to look at below—but we can promise that, with a couple steps, you’ll never have to worry about accidentally deleting your favorite and treasured images again. Let’s take a look at how to recover lost photos, and how to save them moving forward.
CHECK GOOGLE PHOTOS
Google Photos has gained a lot of traction over the past several years as a must-have application for any kind of photographer. With unlimited storage for high-resolution copies of your photos and videos, and cheap storage for full-resolution upgrades (which uses your Google Drive allocation), it’s an easy decision to start using Google Photos. Everything backs up on WiFi quickly, and allows you to access your entire library from any device your Google account is signed into. The app is preinstalled on most Android devices with Play Store access as a mandatory application, which means there’s a good chance it’s already on your phone. With more than 1 billion installs worldwide, Photos is the most popular gallery app on Android by far, and with its comprehensive featureset, cloud backup, and simple design, it’s easy to see why it’s so popular with Android users.
If your phone uses Google Photos as the main gallery app, we have good news for you. Google Photos is not just one of the best photos apps on Android today, but it also has a built-in trash feature that saves you from accidentally deleting photos you might want to keep. Unlike in other gallery applications on Android, Google Photos has two different kinds of deletion tools. The first, Archive, simply moves your photo collection from your main gallery to an archive which hides your backed-up photo from your normal view, without deleting the content from your device (or even moving the photo from the folder it was originally saved in). You can browse your archive at any time, though your archived files simply won’t display in your normal gallery view. More importantly, however, is the Trash feature in Photos. Any picture or video deleted in Google Photos is automatically removed from your device and moved from your cloud storage to Trash. Once a file is in your trash, you have 60 days to restore the file before it’s automatically restored to your device.
If you use Google Photos as your main gallery app—and you really should—you’ll likely be able to find whatever you deleted in your trash. Select the file, and at the bottom of your display, hit the Restore button to bring back your content. Your photo will be restored automatically to the cloud, and you can redownload the file to your device if you need a local copy. Beyond the obvious advantages to always using Google Photos as your main gallery app, the built-in catch-all for deleted videos and photos (alongside automatic backups) make it easy to never lose another treasured memory again.
CHECK YOUR GALLERY APP
Not every phone has Google Photos installed on it, of course, and even devices that include it aren’t always activated. Older phones don’t necessarily ship with the app, and the same goes for some tablets that lack access to Google Play. Every device has some sort of gallery application, however, typically designed by the manufacturer to help users sort through their photos and make sense of their collection. It makes sense, then, that we can’t test every single gallery app on Android today, since most apps are limited to their phones. We did, however, grab one of the most-popular gallery apps from the Play Store to see how it would handle deleting content. That app, Simple Gallery, has a solid 4.5 rating and lacks both advertisements and in-app purchases, making it an ideal download for anyone looking for a basic gallery application. It functions just as most standard gallery apps do, including Samsung’s and LG’s, and on our test Pixel 2 XL, we’ll be using it to supplement the typical included basic gallery app on most smartphones.
Here’s the bad news: when we deleted photos using the Simple Gallery app, they disappeared from our device, without a way to restore them within the gallery. Unlike Google Photos, which has the ability to trap your deleted photos in a temporary trash bin before permanently deleting them after 60 days, Simple Gallery—and, presumably, most other gallery apps that are similar to this, including gallery apps from Samsung and LG—doesn’t have the ability to save your photos in a temporary dumping ground in case you delete the wrong file. Simple Gallery does ask if you’re sure you want to delete files before you do, which helps to save your files before they’re deleted, but we’re willing to bet that a large selection of gallery apps made for basic phones simply don’t have the technology to grab files from your device before you delete them. Which, in all honesty, is a shame. The trash section of Google Photos works well for what it is, though you could argue it really only works because the device uploads those files to the cloud.
USE A PHOTO RECOVERY APP
If you don’t use Google Photos as your main application for backing up your work, and you can’t find your deleted photos in the gallery app of your choice, you might not be out of luck just yet. Thanks to the way Android handles its file system, you can use a photo recover application to scan your hardware and look for any deleted content on your device. This way, if something did happen to the photos on your device, you’ll be able to pull them back out from the brink and save the content you deleted. In many ways, these photo recover apps act like Google Photos’ own trash can, designed to catch the content you delete and hold it briefly before sending it off to final deletion. At the same time, it does this without any sort of cloud uploading or account services, so if the idea of keeping your photo collection in the cloud is a little too much for you, you might be interested in one of these two apps.
DELETED PHOTO RECOVERY
Deleted Photo Recovery was a bit of a disappointment, if we’re being honest. At 4.3 stars on Google Play, the app is well-received generally for its ease of use and its utility, but we found the app to be overly confusing and generally difficult to use. Part of this came from the user interface; after clicking through an advertisement, the app showed several different folders without the names or any kind of information. It later became obvious the app was showing every image on the phone, both hidden and unhidden from the file system, but at first glance, it was difficult to tell where this content was coming from. Opening up Simple Gallery and turning on hidden files helped us figure it out: the photos weren’t deleted at all, but were hidden photos from different apps that had been found on our test device.
To test Deleted Photo Recovery, we took two screenshots on our Pixel 2 XL, then used Simple Gallery to delete the photos. While going through the app, opening each folder, we were eventually able to find the photos in a couple different places within the app, which were then restored using the app. Photo Recovery automatically placed the photos in a new folder, called Restored Photos, and opening Simple Gallery revealed the screenshot intact at full resolution. Deleted Photo Recovery was also able to restore images that were deleted prior to the installation of the app, though not every photo was applicable. Before installing the app, we used Google Photos’ automatic deletion tool to remove content from our device completely, and the app was able to find some of those photos buried in our file system. But not every photo was found, which means unless you already have Deleted Photo Recovery installed on your device, you’ll likely be unable to restore the content.
As mentioned, the biggest downfall towards Photo Recover is the interface. The app is colored an ugly brown shade, featuring unlabeled folders that make it impossible to detect what you’re doing on the app at any given moment. Hitting back anytime in the app will load an advertisement, and the whole experience feels unpolished, like a relic from earlier days of Android. Whether this is a dealbreaker for everyone remains to be seen, but our other photo recovery application reviewed below simply does what Deleted Photo Recovery does, but better in almost every way.
DUMPSTER
Unlike Deleted Photo Recovery, we had excellent luck with Dumpster, which acts like the trash feature in Google Photos but for your entire phone. Basically, Dumpster takes your files that you delete from your device and keeps them inside the app for a limited amount of time, acting as a go-between for any files that are deleted off your phone. In addition to photos and videos, Dumpster allows you to restore audio files, gifs, folders, voice memos, and anything else you remove from your device automatically. Generally speaking, we found Dumpster to be an excellent addition to our device, designed to work in the background without interruptions and only being necessary when you need it.
The interface of Dumpster is solid, with a fresh design that, unlike Deleted Photo Recovery, feels recent and made for modern Android. Ads are here, but they feel a bit more manageable than they did on our previously-tested app (they only seem to appear when first opening the app). Dumpster has a tutorial that shows you how to use the app, but it’s really pretty simple. When you delete a file, it’s automatically caught by Dumpster, which holds onto it by default indefinitely. This is important to remember: because your files are caught by Dumpster, deleting files on your device may not automatically free up space. Auto-clean is off by default, which makes sense when you consider that some users may not realize they’ve deleted content until weeks later, but this means you’ll have to manually deleted content from your device in order to properly remove files from your computer (similar to clearing out content from the Recycling Bin on Windows). We suggest setting Dumpster to delete files after a week, though you can set up auto-deletion for any date that feels comfortable to you.
Overall, the biggest problem with Dumpster is that it simply isn’t designed to recover photos you deleted prior to installing the app. If you had the foresight to set up Dumpster on Android prior to deleting photos (and considering the app has far over 10 million downloads, plenty of people have), you’re good to go. But if you did do that, you wouldn’t be reading this article and searching Google for a way to recover your photos. This makes Dumpster a great app to have moving forward, but not necessarily a good one for recovering images and videos you deleted several days ago.
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As with most deleted files, it’s impossible to guarantee you’ll be able to find your deleted photos on your Android device once you’ve confirmed the deletion action. If you weren’t already using Google Photos, you have a solid chance of getting your photo back with one of the three apps above. Dumpster is a great app to install and keep running in the background for future events, and DiskDigger is excellent at digging up photos you might have lost recently while removing content from your phone. There will never be a 100 percent chance of getting photos you accidentally deleted back from the graveyard; that simply isn’t how these photos work. What you might be able to discover, however, is that the content was never deleted from your phone, saving your treasured memories and putting them back on your phone.
Whether you can or can’t get your photos back, however, you should treat lost or nearly-lost photos as a reminder to set up some protection. Start by using Google Photos for your photo backup; it’s done over the cloud, it’s free for most users who are fine with “high quality” uploads (16MP photos, 1080p video), and it’s seamless, always backing up your content from your phone or tablet in the background. It’s an easy first step that’s basically a no-brainer when you’re looking to ensure you don’t lose your content. If you don’t want to use Google Photos, the next best step is to set up Dumpster on your device to make sure that any files you delete accidentally can be saved in a Recycling Bin of sorts for Android. Hopefully, one of the methods above can be used to save your valued images, grabbing them back from the brink of deletion and restoring photos of your vacation, your pets, or whatever else you accidentally deleted. If you can’t find the files—if it’s been too long, or if the apps fail to scan your phone—at the very least, you can use this opportunity to set up security measures so you never again lose files from your device that weren’t meant for deletion.
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