We’ve all been there. You’re scrolling your phone’s gallery, looking for old photos to delete to free up some space. Suddenly, you mistakenly delete an important picture. Your first thought is: how do I get it back?
Handy Gear gets questions like this all the time. But there’s good news. Both Android and iOS devices give you a window in which you can retrieve those pictures. You just need to take action before that timeline elapses.
If You Use an iPhone
On iOS, photos that you’ve deleted moves to the “Recently Deleted” folder. Apple Support says that you can get these files back after 30 days of deleting them. Once this timeline ends, they’re deleted from your phone, and you won’t be able to retrieve them unless you’ve got a backup.
Get back deleted media by following these simple steps:
- Go to the Photos app
- Scroll to the bottom
- Tap Recently Deleted in the Utilities area
- Click View Album. Note that you may need to authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID
- Tap on the image you’d like to recover and click Recover
Once you follow all these steps, the photos will be back in your library.
If You Use an Android
Deleted pictures on Android devices are stored in the Trash folder. But they won’t stay here forever. According to Google Support, clips and images in the Trash are automatically deleted after 30 days.
To recover an image in the Trash folder, take these steps:
- Open the Google Photos app
- Go to the bottom. Here, click Collections. On the page that opens up, tap Trash
- Touch and hold any image you want to recover and tap on Restore
Once you follow these steps, the photo returns to your library. If you can’t find an image in the Trash, it has most likely been deleted permanently as the 30-day recovery period has elapsed.
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That said, if you use your phone’s own gallery app rather than Google Photos, check its trash folder too. It just might be there. Note that most OEM gallery apps will delete photos after a 30-day period also.
Tips to Avoid Losing Photos Forever
Apple and Google allow you 30 days to recover the images or videos you accidentally deleted. But if this timeframe ends and you don’t recover them, those media files are gone for good.
If you think you’ve deleted an important picture on your phone, don’t wait days to recover it. It’s better to do it right away. Life can get busy, and it’s easy to forget to recover those files until your grace period elapses.
Another way you can avoid losing photos for good is by enabling backup. Doing this on both Android and iOS devices saves your images to the cloud. So, even if something happens to your phone, you can always access your images on a new device, as long as you’re logged into the account you enabled backups on.
FAQs
Do deleted photos still take up space on your phone?
Yes, they do. They’re still part of your phone until they’re automatically deleted after 30 days. That’s why you can still recover them before the 30 days are up.
Can you recover photos if your phone is lost or broken?
You can, only if you turned on backup before either event took place. If you did, you’d find your files in iCloud (iOS) or Google Photos (Android).
