How to Recover Deleted or Lost Photos from Samsung Galaxy/Note

Nov.. Posted by to Android Topic

Mobile camera enables us to record our life anytime and anywhere. Beautiful scenery, happy moments with family and friends, novelties on the trips, etc. can be well stored in our phones. However, have you ever faced the trouble of deleting your photos accidentally? Have you ever suffered from the regret of losing precious photos? Are you looking forward to an ideal software which can help you retrieve deleted pictures from Samsung GalaxyS5/S6/S7/S8/S9?

How Does Samsung Galaxy Phone Store Photos?

In order to understand how the program can recover the deleted photos on the phone, we'd better take a brief look at how Samsung galaxy S5 store Photos. Photos on our phones are stored in the SD or Memory card. Many people supposed that once the photos are deleted, the photos can no longer exist. However, deletion that people normally do on their phones just let the system to modify the file a location table to release the file of space. In fact, the electronic data of the photo is still stored in the data area. When you perform the deletion action, the data will not be cleared in a real sense, they still exist in the phone in another form. The photo will be truly deleted when new data is written to covered the old data. Recovery of photos can be done before new data is written.

It is well known that there are many reasons lead to the data lost, incorrect operation, restoring factory settings, damaged or broken phone, flashing ROM, rooting, etc. But the actual contents of the file are still physically present on the internal storage, until overwritten by new data and can be recovered using android recovery tools. We will talk about in next section.

 

Method 1: How to Recover Deleted Photos on Samsung Galaxy S5/S6/S7/S8/S9

Androidphonesoft Android Data Recovery is a powerful data recovery program targeted for Android users. It can directly scan the internal memory and SD card to recover the deleted or lost photos from Samsung Galaxy phone without damaging the original data. One of the cool things is that you can preview and select the deleted photos after scan, which is quite user friendly.

Besides data recovery, it also has other useful functions like recovering files from broken screen device, removing forgotten lock screen password or making complete data backup. Overall, it is a nice tool for Android users.

Supported Samsung Phone: Galaxy S9/S8/S7/S7/S6/S5/, Galaxy Note 8/7/6/5/4 and Galaxy J series.

Win versionMac version

Step 1 Prepare for Download and Install

Android Data Recovery is a desktop program so you need to download and install it on a computer. After installation, you will see a screen like the below picture. For Samsung data recovery, you should click on "Recover" button to open the utility embedded in the program.

android recovery main

Step 2 Plug Your Samsung Phone to PC

The next step is connect the phone to computer with a USB cable. Make sure Android USB driver is installed properly on that computer.

android recovery connect

Step 3 Enable USB Debugging before Scanning

USB debugging allows direct access to the phone via this program. So it can scan and recover files from the device.If you don't know what USB debugging is, you probably have not enabled it. Follow the detailed steps to manually enable USB debugging for the phone. If you don't enable USB debugging, then the program will fail to recognize your phone.

android recovery start

Step 4 Allow Superuser Request and Scan Your Samsung Galaxy S5/S6/S7/S8/Note

There will be a pop-up dialog box asking for permission to start the scanning process on a rooted phone. Just press "OK" on the phone until it does not show up again.  click the "Start" button in the screen below to scan your Samsung Galaxy for deleted files. Before doing this, make sure that your phone battery is more than 20%.

Note: If it was stuck on scanning process, it means auto rooting failed. In such a case, you have to root the phone manually.

Select the Data Type

Step 5 Select Photos

To save the whole scanning time and spend up the scanning the process, the program provides checkbox for targeted scanning, this is where you select file types, for lost photos, you're allowed to only check "Gallery". And select one of the modes. Standard mode is recommended in here.

android recovery scan

Step 6 Preview and Recover Pictures from Samsung Galaxy Phone

It will take a few minutes to finish the whole scanning process based on the size of the data. After scanning, all of lost photos will be organized in a tree structure with the name, size, deleted time. Pictures are ready to be checked. Tick in the corresponding boxes or simply choose them all. Finally, click "Recover" button to save the deleted photos on computer.

preview lost photos on Android phone 

This Samsung Data Recovery is equipped with comprehensive functions, advanced data recovery technology and user-friendly interface; it can be definitely an ideal choice for your Samsung galaxy device. It can detect your phone model and scan your phone quickly and automatically. And also scan memory CARDS, mobile phone SD card very fast.  If you have mastered the operating essentials, you'll never worry about the troubles caused by accidental data deletion and you will not get dumbfounded when you encounter that sort of thing.

Warning:
1. Stop using your phone right away, otherwise the original deleted data will overwritten by the new created data, it means it will makes the recovery harder.
2. Make sure that your device is left with power of over 20% so that it won't shut down during the process.

Win versionMac version

Update: according to our user feedback, TunesBro method is also considerable if the above method is not working in you case.

 

Method 2: Recover Deleted Photos from Galaxy Phone via Samsung Cloud

Samsung Cloud is a backup service provided by Samsung to help users backup and restore data on all Samsung devices, including smartphone, tablet and laptops. You will never lose any memorable photos once enabling photo backup on Samsung cloud. Even when you lose your phone, photos on the phone can be restored with Samsung Cloud once you signed in the same account. Samsung Cloud is the best choice to recover deleted photos on Galaxy phone if you already turned on this feature on the phone.

Step 1: Open Settings app on your phone in the App Drawer. If you've previously backed up your data to Samsung Cloud, you can easily restore it.

Step 2: Navigate to Accounts and backup ->Backup and restore ->Restore data.

Step 3: Scroll down and tap on Gallery so that you can recover your deleted photos.

Step 4: Tap on Restore option at the botton of screen. All your photos from the last cloud backup will start restoring on Galaxy phone. The process will take a few minutes to hours, depending how many photos on cloud.

Restore Data Samsung Galaxy S10

 

Method 3: Recover Deleted Samsung Photos via Smart Switch

Samsung Smart Switch is an across platform app for content migration and data backup. The PC version is built with two major functions: data backup and data restore. So if you ever backed up Samsung Galaxy phone with Smart Switch, then it is easy to restore deleted photos from previous backup.

Step 1: To get started, visit this link to install the Smart Switch version on your computer.

Step 2: Connect your Galaxy phone to the computer and then open Smart Switch.

Step 3: Click the "Restore" option to continue. Double click on "Change data to restore" option and select your photos.

Step 4: Double tap on "OK" and choose "Restore now". Wait for a few minutes and the selected photos will then restored to your Galaxy phone.

Restore from Smart Switch

 

Method 4: Recover Deleted Samsung Photos via Google Drive

Google Drive is one of the most popular cloud services that is available for free for all Android users. Google Drive allows you to backup data, including your photos on most of Android phones for free. Google Drive is very handy when you can easily store photos on Galaxy phone and then access on any other devices without losing them.

Note: If you have already installed Google Photos app on your Galaxy phone, it's likely that copies of your photos were already saved to cloud. All you need is to sign into your Google account from your Galaxy phone or computer.

Here are steps you should follow to recover deleted photos and restore them on your Galaxy phone with Google Drive backup.

Step 1: Download and then open Google Drive app on Galaxy phone.

Step 2: Tap on and hold your photos to restore.

Step 3: Hold on them and select Download option to recover your photos.

Recovery from Google Drive

 

Alternatively, you can download the backup photos of Galaxy phone from Google Drive on computer and then follow these steps below:

Step 1: Launch any browser on your computer and visit https://drive.google.com

Step 2: Log in your Google account that you used to backup photos of your Samsung Galaxy phone to Google drive.

Step 3: After signing in, you can preview all your uploaded photos. choose your images and then download them. To download multiple files, just press firmly Shift or Ctrl buttons to choose multiple images.

Step 4: When done, right click on them and start the download. After that, you can connect the phone to computer and transfer photos from computer to Galaxy phone.

 

Conclusion

For all Samsung Galaxy smartphone owners, taking backup is one of the most important tasks to avoid data loss. It could be much harder to recover deleted photos without backup. No matter which backup service or tool you are using, just don't forget to do this.

 

Sophia Lee

Sophia Lee

Senior editor

Sophia is a senior editor of Androidsoft. She discovered the fascinating world of Android and constantly share the most practical tips and tricks for Android users.

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