Deleted Photo Recovery for Android Smartphones

It can happen to any of us. One swipe of the finger and you’ve just erased all those photos you took on your phone of your family’s trip to the Grand Canyon last summer. All those mementos of your vacationgone. How will you share your memories of this trip with your friends and family now? Fortunately, your memories haven’t gone down the drain just yet. Whether through careful use of deleted photo recovery software tools, or help from the phone data recovery experts at Gillware, you can still get those deleted photos back.

Where Do Your Deleted Photos Go?

Purgatory: Where your files go when they die

Smart phones work exactly (or rather, almost exactly) like your laptop or desktop computer. They treat deleted files just the same as your computer does. There are some cosmetic differences, to be sure. Your phone is a lot more compact, and uses flash memory instead of a hard disk drive (which is good, because you can only make those things so small…). But the file system plays by the same rules.

A computer or smartphone’s logical file system is a bit like an address book for all of your data. When you delete files, you tear those pages out of the address book. But you haven’t gotten rid of those files–at least, not yet.

Rather, those files continue to live on in a sort of digital limbo. All the data is still there. However, all the signposts leading to it have vanished. These files have, essentially, become ghosts. To your phone, your deleted photos have become as ghosts–invisible and intangible.

This purgatory for your deleted files is only temporary. To your phone, the space these digital ghosts occupy might as well be empty. And, as you write new data to the device, that data starts to cover up the old data. When you look at data storage on the scale of sectors–512-byte “units” of data–there’s no backup to rely on. Once you change the data that fills any given sector, you can’t just “roll back” the change. Creating a new file using the same sectors that store a deleted file will destroy that deleted file.

This is good news and bad news. The good news is that you have a window of opportunity to recover deleted photos after a slip of your finger wipes out those photos you took of your family’s summer trip to Disneyland. The bad news is that, as you use your phone, that window of opportunity is constantly shrinking.

Making Deleted Photo Recovery Possible

With that in mind, you have to act fast if you want to recover deleted photos from your Android smartphone. Quickand level-headedthinking will help you keep that shrinking window of opportunity as wide as possible, for as long as possible.

  1. Turn off both wi-fi and data connections for your phone. Any new data you download to your phone, even inadvertently, can overwrite the portions of your phone’s memory that still store your deleted photos. This means no web browsing, no installing new software, and no updates to your phone’s Android operating system.
  2. Don’t take any more pictures with your phone. Those new photos you take could land right on top of the old ones–and then your deleted data will be gone for good.

There are plenty of deleted photo recovery software tools out there to help you get those lost photos back. When looking for a trustworthy photo recovery software tool, just keep in mind the above two points. Any good software tool will be something you install on your computer, not your phone; installing any tools to your phone could erase your deleted photos outright, or leave them with massive amounts of corruption as portions of the files become overwritten.

When using your deleted photo recovery software tool of choice, make sure to follow the instructions carefully. Data recovery software developers want their products to be successful; they’ll be sure to provide clear tutorials so that people can easily use their products to recover their deleted files.

When to Ask Deleted Photo Recovery Experts for Help

There is an alternative to using deleted photo recovery software to get those pictures you took back. Whether the software you tried just couldn’t hack it, or you would just prefer to leave your data in more experienced hands, you can turn to professional data recovery services.

It’s like fixing your bike, or repairing your patio, or re-shingling your roof. You can do all these things yourself, and probably do a pretty good job at them (if you’re so inclined). But there are valid reasons why you might prefer to bring your bike to a shop, or call professionals to fix your patio or your roof. Maybe you feel it’s out of your wheelhouse and would rather leave it to people with years of experience helping people like you, even if it means paying a bit more for the convenience.

The experts at a professional data recovery lab know exactly what they are doing. At a world-class lab like, for example, Gillware Data Recovery, you can rest easy knowing that our deleted photo recovery experts know exactly what to do to have the best chance of success in recovering your deleted photos.

At Gillware Data Recovery, our deleted smartphone recovery specialists can retrieve deleted photos from Android mobile phones. Our data recovery services are both professional and affordable, with world-class services at, on average, half the costs of other data recovery labs. On top of that, our data recovery process is financially risk-free. We offer free data recovery evaluations, with free inbound shipping to send your mobile phone to our data recovery lab on our dime.

At the end of our evaluation, we present you with a firm price quote and work with you to determine acceptable data recovery goals. We only charge you for our smartphone recovery work after we’ve successfully met your deleted photo recovery goals. If the damage to your deleted photos is too severe, or the cost isn’t worth the value of your data, you don’t owe us a dime.

Backing Up Your Photos on Android Smart Phones

So you’ve dodged a bullet here–you’ve gotten back your deleted photos. Whatever method worked for you, the next question on your mind should be, “How can I stop this from happening again?” While the Android operating system continues to evolve, you really need to make sure your backups are happening in an automated fashion.

For Android users, the Google Photos app can help back up every photo you take. That way, you’ll never want for a backup when you accidentally delete your photos. You can easily install the app, go into its Settings menu, select “Backup and Sync”, and choose how you want your photos backed up, and how often you want your photos sent to Google’s cloud. You can even view and share the photos you take on your phone on your desktop.

Will Ascenzo
Will Ascenzo

Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.

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