Android smartphones are much more capable now in terms of camera performance than it was a few years ago. Our primary camera device has shifted from bulky DSLR to Smartphones. In general, mobile phones pack lots of features and hardware in a compact body. It will not come as a surprise when smartphones will eventually replace many additional accessories we use.

We already manage all our photos on smartphones cutting off computers for a backup device. But things go south when we lose our precious photos accidentally while freeing up storage space. But there is nothing to worry about. Today, we will learn how to recover deleted photos of Android devices easily.

Steps to Recover Deleted Photos from Android Devices:

• If you are using an Android device, chances are your default gallery is Google Photos. Google Photos is a photo and video management app from where you can also back up photos on Google’s cloud. So when you delete a photo from the Photos app, it only gets deleted from the device storage and not from your Google account. The photo is still backed up to your Google account and can still be accessed.
• To recover the deleted photos, open Photos app and tap on the hamburger menu (three small horizontal lines) on the top left side. It will show you a left pane with a list of options to choose from. Look for Trash and tap on it and you’ll find all your deleted photos. You can simply long-press on a photo and choose to restore it. You can also choose multiple photos at once. Do note that photos deleted after 60 days can’t be recovered.
• If the deleted photos are not being displayed in the trash then you need to log in to Google Photos from a PC. When signed in to Photos, access the Trash folder. You should be able to recover the files from here. There is also an archive menu; do check that in case you have archived the photos by mistake. Archiving photos hide the photos from the gallery.
• Sometimes even after the photo is deleted, it is still available in the Google Drive app. Open the Drive app and check the Photos folder. Also, make sure to check trash in the Google Drive application. Restore if you find the deleted photos.

Some Other Ways to recover the photos:

Sometimes even after the photos are deleted, it is still available in the cache partition of Android devices. All you have to do is open file explorer on your Android device and access the Android folder. There will be two folders, data, and obb. Enter data and you will find here temporary folders of all the apps on your phone. Look for and tap on the Gallery app. You will see a cache folder containing all the cached copies of photos of your device.

It may show a blank page. In that case, hidden files are turned off on your device. Just enable show hidden files from the left panel. It should now show every saved photo and you can copy them to a different directory.

If you can’t find the deleted photos in the cache partition folder then you can recover it from a hidden directory called thumbnail. This directory has the thumbnails of every photo on your Android device. Open File Explorer and navigate to the DCIM folder. Enable the ‘show hidden files’ option and you will see a ‘thumbnail’ folder. Enter it and you can find all the deleted photos here. Again, these are hidden photos; change it to readable by going to the properties of each photo.

Dig Deeper into Internal Storage to Recover Deleted photos:

In the Android file system, there are “.nomedia” files in certain directories which are also called dotfiles. These files are responsible for hiding media content from gallery apps. The Android compiler doesn’t scan a folder with “.nomedia” files in them. Open File Explorer and try deleting these dotfiles from media folders so that gallery apps can detect deleted photos if it’s available anywhere in the internal storage of your Android device.

Android has a complex and advanced file system. It consists of many structured layers. When a file is deleted, it is not actually deleted but removed from the user’s access. The data bits exists in disk data sectors. To recover the deleted photos from Android just open file explorer and go to search and type the image format of the photo. For example, if the photo was a jpg file, type ‘.jpg’ in the search box. It will show all image with jpg extension from your Android device which has .jpg image format. Android digs deeper and also looks for deleted sectors to find the image. If you find the deleted photos, recover it to a new directory.

These are some easy tips and tricks to recover deleted photos from Android devices. We hope it helped you understand Android’s file management structure and you can eventually recover the deleted photos or else you can also take the help of Data Recovery Dubai.