How to Recover Lost and Deleted Photos from Mobile Phone
So you lost photos from your mobile phone while sending them to your friend via Bluetooth or while transferring them to your computer. Have you deleted them mistakenly while trying to perform some other activities on them? If these are the cases, then you need not worry, as there are professional mobile phone photo recovery tools, which can recover your lost or deleted photos. Moreover, recovery of photos lost due to any other reason apart from the above-mentioned ones is also possible.
All photos and other multimedia data on your mobile phone are stored either on the phone’s memory card or in its internal memory. The mobile phones support various types of memory cards, such as MicroSD card, MicroSDHC, MiniSD, Compact Flash card, TransFlash card, etc. These memory cards are generally used in Motorola, Nokia, and other brand of phones. On the other hand, the Sony Ericssion phones use Memory Stick Micros (M2) card. The images captured by your mobile phone are either saved to the memory card of your phone or stored in phone’s internal memory. Therefore, the loss is also dependent upon the storage medium, i.e. the loss can be from memory card as well as from internal memory of phone.
Irrespective of the storage medium, the loss includes loss of your invaluable memories that you captured using your mobile phone. However, do not panic, as you may still have chances to restore your lost photos with the help of mobile phone photo recovery software. Professional software of this category has simple and intuitive user interface with which you can perform the recovery of your lost or deleted photos by yourself. Generally, efficient photo recovery software is capable of recovering videos, audios, and other multimedia files as well. However, the recovery with any professional tool can be of two types, depending upon the way in which your mobile phone stores data.
If your mobile phone stores data on an external device like memory card, then to recover photos from external media, you have to follow some other steps than the steps that you have to follow recovering your photos when they are in phone’s internal memory. Let us discuss these two scenarios in brief:
If the photos are saved on the memory card of your phone: If the lost or deleted photos are on the memory card of your phone, then you have to attach this card to your computer. You can attach the phone directly with the data cable and a drive letter will be provided to the memory card. In this case, if the memory card of your camera appears in ‘My Computer’ of your system, then you can recover photos from mobile phone directly from there. However, you can attach the memory card directly to your computer by using the card reader. It is seen that using the card reader to perform recovery ensures successful recovery.
If you find that your phone memory card is MicroSD, then you need MicroSD card reader or ‘MicroSD to SD’ card adapter. In the same way, Memory Stick requires Memory Stick Micro reader and so on. You can find card readers in local computer shops as well as you can shop for them online through Amazon or some other online shopping sites like this. They are not very costly and can easily be bought.
If the photos are saved in the internal memory of your phone: If the drive letter shows up for the internal memory of your phone or if the shown drive letter of your connected phone is only for the internal memory, then you can easily recover photo from internal memory by using the software and scanning the internal memory. However, if the internal memory is not displayed separately, then it is impossible to recover data from it.
In order to perform a successful recovery of your lost, deleted, or formatted photos with any efficient photo recovery software, you have to follow certain precautions. These precautions are:
- Do not click any photograph after encountering the loss.
- Do not download or delete any file from your phone.
- Do not transfer any file to or from your affected mobile phone.
- Do not save the recovered photos on your affected memory card until complete recovery is performed on it.
This is to stop the overwriting of your deleted photos. Yes, the photos that are deleted do not go immediately from the storage media, but the index associated with it is deleted initially. Since the Operating System (OS) interacts with the Index entry only, its deletion makes the photos unavailable. Moreover, in such situation, the OS marks the space occupied by your deleted photo as ready to be reused. Availability of this space for reuse overwrites the photos when you save a new file on this affected media. Therefore, if your mobile phone is using memory card for storing the photos and other media files, then there are high chances of recovery, as you can take the card out and keep it aside until the recovery software performs its job.
In this way, if you follow the above precaution and use professional photo recovery software that supports recovery from mobile phones, then you can expect a successful recovery of your lost photos. This is because a photo recovery tool scans the storage media and tries to extract data from the locations that do not have any index entry associated with them.
Generally, a reliable photo recovery tool has three simple steps of recovery, which are:
- Select: Attach your affected memory card to your computer and start the recovery software. Now, select your attached drive that is shown as a drive letter in your ‘My Computer’.
- Scan: After selecting the storage media, hit the option for scanning it. The scanning process scans the media completely and provides the preview of recoverable photos in its interface. After completion of scan, you can select or unselect the photos to be recovered.
- Save: After selecting the photos for recovery, save them to a location of your choice.
With these simple steps of professional software, you can perform the recovery of your lost, deleted, or formatted photos without much trouble or time. Most of the reliable photo recovery tools provide the free demo version of their software, so that you can test your tool before purchasing it. The evaluation version or trial version is full-featured software; however, in order to recover your photos actually or save them at your desired location, you have to purchase the license of the tool.
If you are a Mac user and worried whether you can recover your lost photos or not, then do not worry, as most of the professional photo recovery tools have their Mac version as well. The Mac version too is complete software that recovers deleted or lost photos, videos, audios, and other media files without changing the integrity of original data.
So, do not worry, if you have lost photos from your mobile phone, as modern photo recovery tools support most of the phones (including your Smartphones), and hence recover your photos without any trouble.
Author Bio:
Amit is a professional data recovery expert. He also loves to write about different technology related issues. Currently he is exploring Image Recovery Tools to check their efficiency.