Whether it’s your fault or not, losing photos is a real nightmare. Is your computer asking you to rewrite the data on your USB drive, hard drive or SD card? Be careful! This is often synonymous with data loss, and recovering photos or files is no longer so simple.
Even SSD or smartphone manufacturers are getting in on it. To save chips and maintain reading speed, they use the Trim command (which reorganizes unused data blocks) and sometimes make their access inaccessible.
Along the same lines, we can talk about formatting which deletes all or almost all of your data. So many situations beyond your control that ruin your life!
How do you recover your photos? Is it always possible? Do you have to go through a data recovery software only? Before panicking, read our article which gives you plenty of tips for recovering your photos depending on the device.
1. Recovering your photos on a phone
Your smartphone no longer works and you want to replace it? Nothing works anymore and all the photos from a good part of your life are lost. You have a few options before throwing it away :
- Option n° 1 : check your deleted photos. We explain below how to do it depending on your system;
- Option n° 2 : if your phone automatically syncs its data to a Cloud, check the Cloud interface via the mobile or a computer;
- Option n° 3 : determine whether your photos are stored on your phone or your SD card (with Android in particular). Are they all on your card? Scroll down to part 3 of the article.
Recovering photos on an Android smartphone
Let’s start directly with option n° 1 : your trash. Open your gallery and click on the menu. You will see the name “Trash” appear and find everything that was deleted by mistake.
Still can’t find the photos you’re looking for? Try connecting your phone to your computer. If it recognizes it as a storage device, it will be able to show you the deleted photos.
As a last resort, use photo recovery software. Try easeUS MobiSaver, Android Data Recovery Tenorshare or wondershare dr.fone.
Recovering photos on an iPhone
Open your “Photos” app and its “Albums” tab. You will find a file named “Recently Deleted” that you can browse through.
Have you tried via the phone, then via your computer and nothing works? Here too, consider deleted photo recovery software like PhotoRec.
Don’t forget, the best way to avoid losing your photos is to sync your mobile to your Cloud. When buying a smartphone, you automatically get a cloud account, take advantage of it!
Recovering your photos on a broken phone
When the device itself no longer works, technical intervention is required. Chronodisk, a data recovery expert, is able to recover the data in its laboratory.
2. Recovering your photos on a hard drive or SSD drive
If you have lost photos from a hard drive (internal or external) or an SSD drive, there are two options:
- Software recovery which can be done independently or via a specialized provider such as chronodisk. If you know your way around hardware, use software such as Recuva on Windows or Disk Drill on MacOS.
- Technical intervention on the media. You bring your device to the chronodisk laboratory and we recover the photos for you. This intervention is carried out, for example, if you hear a suspicious noise when trying to access your file. It may be because the read head is touching the hard drive platter and damaging the data.
3. Recovering your photos on a USB drive or memory card
Did you lose your photos from your USB drive or your memory card? In both cases, it’s the same process : launch the data recovery software and determine the partition that will receive the images. Then, start the recovery procedure.
Two tips beforehand : never force-remove external drives and don’t add new data, or you risk permanently losing your photos.
Fortunately for us, there are several ways to recover deleted photos. Don’t forget, even when the problem seems unsolvable, you can always turn to the Chronodisk laboratory!