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A family member deleted every photo off my Samsung Galaxy III, does anyone know how I can recover the photos by connecting my phone to my computer?

Notes:

  • The photos are not on a card.
  • Some photos were taken on the phone before I knew that the pictures were deleted.
  • Suspicious software was installed to recover the photos but they didn't work, and one contained malware! So, I am not looking for software recommendations.

I apologize if this has already been answered, just let me know where -- I haven't been able to find the answer.

Sathyajith Bhat
  • 62,374

2 Answers2

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If you're looking for software where it might be possible to "substantiate the trustworthiness of the software" you might consider using PhotoRec (part of the testdisk software). It's source code is available to browse, and it's also in the Debian & Ubuntu (linux distros) repositories, and has been for years. Photorec was originally designed to recover lost photos from memory cards (so I read somewhere) but it can also recover a ton of other filetypes from lots of different filesystems. It runs on Linux, Windows, Mac...

About recovering photos from your phone, as others mentioned if they were on a memory card then taking it out & reading it on a computer would be the easiest. If it were on internal memory, that would be harder, but might be possible if your phone can enable "USB mass storage mode" for the area that held the photos...

Your Samsung could have Android 4 to 4.4, so these instructions from the PhotoRec FAQ might help:

If you want to recover data from a memory card used in your phone, put the card in an USB card reader. To recover files from an internal memory, you have to enable the USB mass storage mode.

Android 4.0-4.1.2

ie. Samsung Galaxy S2/S3 or Nexus, HTC Desire X/V/C, HTC One X/V/S, LG Optimus L5/7/9, Optimus G, Motorola Droid RAZR, Sony Xperia V/T, Kindle Fire HD

  • Open the Setting > More
  • Search then Tap on USB utilities
  • Check the option: Connect Storage to PC

Then plug the USB cable into the device and connect to your computer. The USB connected screen with the large green Android icon will appear. Tap on Connect USB storage. A confirmation dialog box will appear. Tap OK. The green Android icon will turn orange, indicating that the phone is now in USB Mass Storage mode and should now appear as USB disk drives in Devices with Removable Storage

Android 4.2

ie. Nexus 4, Google Nexus 10, Samsung Galaxy S4

  • Go to Settings -> About Phone/Tablet.
  • Go to “Build Number” at the end of the Scroll list.
  • Tap on “Build Number” repeatedly 7 times (Yes, it's not a typo)
  • Now Developer Option will be included in setting list of yours now. Go to “Develop Options” to check USB debugging > OK. Done.

Then you can use PhotoRec on the now accessible drive/partition.

OR

You might be able to copy the entire filesystem from your Android device, then dig through it with PhotoRec / Testdisk, or a similar tool looking for photos, deleted or not. That would involve using ADB (Android Debug Bridge), and might need a rooted device. Some guides are here:

Xen2050
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If the photos were stored on a microSD card etc., the best way is to plug it in to a PC and run a recovery software like PuranFileRecovery or Recuva (personally I recommend Puran, however Recuva recovers files with modification dates, if you care about that). They are portable, easy to use, and usually yield good results, as long as the data wasn't deleted a long time ago. If the photos were on the phone memory, it might be harder, as many Samsungs (for example with Android Jelly Bean) don't give full access to the built-in memory.

I don't recommend using DrFone software, as it doesn't work well and it also leaves a lot of 'traces' of itself on the phone and on the computer.