Most modern cell phones now allow you to take very good quality photos and videos. Unfortunately, it’s also far too easy to accidentally delete them as well!
The good news is though, that in many cases it can also be very easy to recover lost cell phone pictures too!
WARNING
Avoid doing anything with the phone that increases the
likelihood of new files and data being written to its
memory or memory card until you have read the guide below.This will increase your chances of being able to recover your
lost mobile phone pictures successfully.
The image data for picture and video files is usually kept on the phone by storing the files on a memory card inside the phone.
When you delete photos from the phone, the data itself is not normally removed as that would take some time to do. So what usually happens is that just the index record that tells the phone where the data is stored on the card (or in the memory) is deleted instead.
This means the cell phone now has no current record details of the where the data is for those pictures on the phone.
It also means that the space where the lost cell phone pictures were stored can now be used by the phone for storing new pictures and data.
So, to have the best chance of being able to recover deleted phone photos successfully, try and avoid doing anything with the phone that increases the likelihood of new files and data being written to the cell phone’s memory card.
How to Recover Lost Cell Phone Pictures
The easiest way to find out if you can recover the pictures deleted from the phone, is to connect your phone (or its memory card ) to a computer and run the photo recovery software that we recommend in our guide to photo recovery below.
This will show you what pictures can still be recovered from the phone. If you can see your deleted pictures in the list and as a small image in the preview pane then they can be recovered.
Recovering Lost and Deleted Photos from a Cell Phone Card
Check out our guide to recovering deleted cell phone photos here.
I wanted to know if it was possible for me to retrieve old delete pictures from a cell phone I no longer have?
That would be quite unlikely.
You’d need to still have the phone available to connect to a PC with Photo Recovery Software as detailed on this webpage.
Or to have previously saved them somewhere else first while you still had the camera.
Is it possible to recover from phone memory(not memory card). I accidentally deleted a photo from phone memory. i heard this software recovers only from memory card. Please let me know how to recover from phone memory
It depends on the phone and how it is seen by the PC it is connected to (if it is seen as an external device).
Easiest way to find out is to connect the phone to the PC using its USB connection cable, run the trial version of the software and see if it sees the phone as a device. If it does, it should be able to attempt the recovery as normal.
Hope that helps.