How to Recover Lost Photos on iPhone/Android/Windows: 6 Ways

Photos, now mainly stored on digital devices such as phones and computers, play an important role in everyone's life. They contact us with the past and remind us of people, places, feelings, and stories. Losing significant photos is a nightmare for all of us.

Fortunately, in most cases, lost pictures can be retrieved through a variety of methods. Today, we will introduce you to six effective methods on how to recover lost photos from iPhone, Android, and Windows computers. Hope they can help you get back your lost precious photos.

Common reasons for photo loss

Before getting into how to get lost photos back, you can keep an eye on common causes for losing photos to avoid photo loss in the future.

• Accidental deletion of photos.
• Unintentional formatting of photo storage devices, like SD cards.
• Improper removal of the photo storage device from your phone/PC results in its corruption.
• Virus infection or malware attack on digital devices.

Notes:✎...

If you store your photos on an SD card and find that all photos on it are lost, you can first try to disconnect the card from your device and reconnect it again to recover photos from SD card.

Section 1. How to recover lost photos from iPhone

When you accidentally delete photos from iPhone, pictures are not gone forever but are moved to the recently deleted folder, where deleted pictures will save 30 days for recovery. If recently deleted recovery does not work for you, there is another solution about how to restore deleted pictures on iPhone for you. Here are steps for how to recover lost photos on iPhone.

Way 1. Recover lost photos from recently deleted

In the following, you will learn how to get photos back from recently deleted.

Step 1. Open the Photos app and choose the Albums view.

Step 2. Scroll through the list of Albums to click on Recently Deleted.

Step 3. Choose the wanted picture or click Select to tap on multiple desired photos, and then click Recover > Recover Photo(s) to restore deleted photos.

Way 2. Recover lost photos with backup

If you have photo backups on your iTunes or iCloud, another practical method for you to recover permanently deleted photos on iPhone is restoring from backup. Here we take retrieving photos from iTunes as an example to show you the detailed steps of restoring files from backup.

Step 1. Launch iTunes on your PC, and connect your iPhone to your computer.

Step 2. On the main page of iTunes, click on the device button in the upper left corner.

Step 3. In the Summary tab, click on Restore Backup.

Step 4. Choose a backup that contains your lost photos, and tap Restore.

Section 2. How to recover lost photos on Android

There are several methods for you to recover missing images on an Android device. Learn how to restore deleted pictures on Android from the trash folder and backup below.

Way 1. Restore lost photos from trash

Similar to iPhone, there would be a trash folder for you to save recently deleted photos. How to recover lost photos from Gallery is shown as follows:

Step 1. Open the Gallery application and click Pictures.

Step 2. Tap Menu and navigate to Trash on the right panel.

Step 3. Choose the stuff you wish to recover and click Restore to restore Gallery photos from deletion.

Way 2. Recover lost photos from Google Photos

If you have saved your pictures on Google Photos, you can follow the guide below to recover photos from Google Photos easily.

Step 1. Run the Google Photos app on your Android.

Step 2. Hit the Menu button at the top left and choose Trash to see all recoverable items.

Step 3. Pick the pictures you wish to recover and tap on the Restore button on the top.

Section 3. How to recover lost photos on Windows

Now, we will present two ways to recover lost pictures on Windows PCs/laptops. If you have a backup file, you can use the first method. If not, you can directly turn to the second one to recover lost photos.

Notes:✎...

Windows comes with Recycle Bin to store all deleted files and folders from disks. You can first check and recover files from Recycle Bin to have a try.

Way 1. Recover lost photos from Windows backup

You could recover missing photos on Windows from Backup and Restore, a Windows native backup utility. It allows you to backup Windows files and Windows systems to hard drives and network drives and restore lost data from backup. If you have enabled Backup and Restore to back up your photos, follow the tutorial below to figure out how to recover deleted photos.

Step 1. Click Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Backup and Restore (Windows 7) in turn.

Step 2. Hit Restore my files under the Restore section.

Step 3. To find your photo backups, click Browse for files, Browse for folders, or Search.

Step 4. Choose a location to save the restored data and click Restore.

Way 2. Recover lost photos with data recovery software

How to recover lost photos without backup? The best Windows data recovery software MyRecover can help you. This free data recovery tool makes deleted photo recovery easy and straightforward for new and experienced users.

With a simple interface, you can restore lost and deleted files in three steps. You could easily recover photos from formatted SD cards, USB flash drives, HDDs, SSDs, etc. Except for photos, it also supports the recovery of videos, audio, documents, zip files, and various types of data.

Get the handy recovery freeware and refer to the how to recover lost photos guide below to get back your lost pictures without a hitch.

Step 1. Select the hard drive/partition where the lost photos are saved. If you want to recover photos from external hard drive, plug it into your computer in advance. Hover the mouse over the external hard drive saved deleted files before, and click Scan.

Step 2. Recoverable data will be detected and displayed with the scanning. You can search for  filename or use the file filter to find the lost photos you want.

Step 3. Select the pictures you need to recover and click Recover xx files to restore them to a secure location.

Conclusion

If you have deleted your valuable photos by accident or your photos get lost due to other reasons and you wish to recover them, we hope that you know how to recover lost photos after reading this article. Whether you desire to recover photos on iPhone, Android, or Windows, you can get a possible solution here.