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How to recover lost photos?

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Photos are the return ticket to the moments otherwise gone. What if you have clicked many photos or edited them using the best photo editing tools but have lost or deleted them accidentally. It hurts, right! Don’t worry! Here we’ve brought you several ways to recover lost photos.

Usually, our photos are stored on the computer’s hard drive, pen drives, phone’s internal memory, or in the SD card on our mobile phones. Well, these days online storage is also an option.

Though convenient to store, photos can also be lost or deleted accidentally while performing some other actions in our device. You can lose your photos due to corrupted device, virus attack, formatting of the disk, or phone or by accidentally deleting them. But that doesn’t mean you have lost them forever. There is always a way to recover lost photos; especially when you haven’t used your device a lot after losing your favorite photos. In this article, we will see how to recover lost photos.

Before going in detail, let’s see what we are going to cover in this article.
  1.  Is it really possible to recover lost photos
  2.  How to recover lost photos on Windows
  3.  How to recover lost photos on Mac
  4.  How to recover lost photos on Android
  5.  Conclusion

Is it really possible to recover deleted photos?

The very first question popping up in your mind would be if my photos got deleted, then how is it possible to recover them. Well, there is always a way to get them back.
Let us understand how is this possible. When you delete any photo, it doesn’t get deleted from your device’s memory immediately. The operating system marks the space used by those photos as ‘usable space’ and uses that space whenever required.
So, your photos are safe till that space gets overwritten by other programs. Thus, you should stop using the device as soon as you get to know that you have lost some of your photos. Else, once the memory occupied by those lost photos get overwritten, there is no way you can recover them back.

How to recover lost photos on Windows?

There are many ways to recover lost photos in Windows. Recycle Bin is always the first option. And if you have deleted the photos even from there, there are other ways too.
Let’s look at each of them one by one.
  1. Recycle Bin: This should always be the first place you should go to recover lost photos. Any deleted file remains here for a specified period of time or until you delete it from here manually.
    How to use
    1. Open the Recycle Bin software.
    2. Right-click on the photo you want to recover; if found.
    3. Click on the ‘Restore’ button in the menu.

  2. Using BackUp files: If you have a habit of taking regular backup of files in your system then it’s very easy to recover lost photos. Every version of Windows has different methods of backup and recovery. In this article, we will move on with Windows 10 and Windows 7. Windows 10 has an in-built feature to restore your files with the ‘File History option’.

    How to use
    1. Search for ‘Restore your files with Files history’ in your Windows.
    2. Search for the photo to be restored.
    3. Click on the ‘Restore’ icon to recover the lost photo.
    4. To recover lost photos from previous versions of Windows from the backup files, follow the steps below.
    5. Go to the Control Panel. 
    6. Under ‘System and Security’, click on ‘Backup and Restore' (Windows 7).
    7. Click on ‘Restore my files’.
    8. Select the photo to be recovered and click on ‘Restore’.
  3. Via System Registry: You can go for this method if you don’t have a Recycle Bin icon on your desktop. You can’t use this method if ‘Don’t move files to Recycle Bin’ property was selected for Recycle Bin properties while deleting your photo.

    The steps to be followed are listed below.

    1. Type ‘RegEdit’ in your search box in Windows or click on the ‘Registry Editor’ icon.
    2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > explorer > Desktop > NameSpace.
    3. Right-click on the left pane and click ‘New’ and then ‘Key’.

      recover lost photos
    4. Type {645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E} and click ‘Enter’.
    5. Close the window and restart your system.
    6. Recycle Bin will appear on your desktop.

      But what if you don’t have backup and you have also emptied your recycle bin. Don’t worry! In such cases, you can opt for photo recovery software.
  4. Disk Drill for Windows, Mac, Android, or iPhone: Disk Drill is a free data recovery software developed by ‘Cleverfiles’. It is quick and easy to use.

    Its various features are:
    1. It allows you to recover up to 500 MB of photos for free. Compatible with both Mac and Windows.
    2. It can be used to recover lost photos even from Android or iPhone.
    3. You can preview the scan results before performing the final recovery.
    4. It is a read-only and non-destructive tool. 
    5. It has a data protection feature to keep photos safe.
    6. You can stop the scan process anytime and restore the photos which have been found.
    7. You can recover lost photos from any device -PC, hard drives, SD cards, phones, or USB by just connecting it to the computer.
    8. It supports 25 image formats, 27 camera raw photo formats, and 36 graphics picture formats.

      How to use
      To get details about how to use the software and to get it for both Windows and Mac, please visit the Cleverfiles website below.
      Cleverfiles.com - Download and learn how to use Disk Drill

      For detailed steps on how to use Disk Drill with Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone, please visit the link below.
      How to use Disk Drill

How to recover lost photos on Mac

Just like Windows, there are many ways to restore lost photos from Mac as well. Let’s have a look.
  1. Trash: It is the Recycle Bin for your Mac where all the deleted files reside until emptied.
    How to use
    1. To recover lost photos from Trash, follow the below steps.
    2. Open the Trash tool.
    3. Select the photo you want to restore.
    4. Right-click on it and then click on ‘Put Back’ to restore it.
  2. From Time Machine backup files: It is an in-built backup and recovery tool that comes with the Mac operating system. It is really helpful if you keep regular backups of your files.
    How to use
    1. To use this in-built software follow the below steps.
    2. Connect the device where you have backed up your photos to your system.
    3. Open the Time Machine tool in your Mac.
    4. Select the photos to be recovered and click the ‘Recover’ button.
  3. Disk Drill: Photo Recovery Software: We have already seen how this software help to recover lost photos in the previous sections. For your ease, we are again providing you the link on how to use it with Mac.
    Steps to use Disk Drill for Mac

How to recover lost photos from Android

It is very easy to lose your photos while performing any other action on your mobile phones. We often accidentally delete our photos or lose it due to the corrupting of the SD card.
Let us see various ways to recover lost photos from Android.
  1. Using cloud storages:

    recover lost photosrecover lost photosrecover lost photos
    If you have any of these apps - Google Photos, OneDrive or DropBox installed on your device and you have backed up your photos here then it’s very easy to recover lost photos.
    For Google Photos, tap ‘Menu’ and then ‘Trash’ at the top left of the app. Select the photos to be recovered and then click on the ‘Restore’ button at the bottom.
    For Microsoft OneDrive, select ‘Me’ and then ‘Recycle Bin’ in the application. Select the photos to be restored and click ‘Restore’.
    For DropBox, open the website DropBox in your browser sign in to your account. Select ‘Files’ in the left pane and then ‘Deleted Files’. Select the desired photos and click ‘Restore’.
    For DropBox, open the website DropBox in your browser sign in to your account. Select ‘Files’ in the left pane and then ‘Deleted Files’. Select the desired photos and click ‘Restore’.
  2. Using the SD card by connecting to your PC: If you have lost your photos from your SD card then you can use Disk Drill to recover lost photos by connecting your phone to Windows or Mac.
    The steps to do so are given in the link provided.

  3. Using Photo Recovery Apps: There are several applications that you can use to recover lost photos. There are many apps on play store for this purpose. In this article, we will see one such app.

    DiskDigger:
    It is a photo recovery app for Android.
    Its features are listed below.
    1. Recovers lost photos from memory cards and internal memory.
    2. No rooting required but root allows you to use more powerful features.
    3. It allows you to save your recovered photo anywhere or upload them to Google Photos, DropBox, or email.
    4. Has ‘clean up’ feature to permanently delete photos from disk.
    5. Has ‘wipe free space’ option to erase the remaining free disk on your device.
        How to use
    1. Install the application on your android phone and launch it.
    2. Install DiskDigger here
    3. Click on the ‘Start Basic Photo Scan button’.
    4. Select the type of file to be recovered and scan for it.
    5. Click on the ‘Recover’ button and choose where you want to save the recovered photos.

Conclusion

In this article, we saw various ways to recover lost photos. You can go to Recycle Bin or Trash for Windows and Mac respectively. If you are in a habit of taking regular backups, just restore your files.

There are also many photo recovery software and application to recover lost photos. In this article, we saw how to use Disk Drill and DiskDigger. But there are many other options available as well.

Just remember that you should stop using your device as soon as possible to recover lost photos to prevent overwriting of the space. And try to take the backup of your photos regularly to make the recovery process faster and easier.

If you think that we have missed out on something or you have some more ideas about the topic, please feel free to contact us via comments.


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