How To Recover Unsaved Lost Photos?
When your hard drive gets too cluttered, deleting old files that are occupying a lot of storage space seems to be the obvious solution. High-resolution photos captured using advanced equipment like DSLR cameras often have file sizes ranging in a few megabytes. An entire folder of such photos could easily occupy several gigabytes on your hard drive. Hence, deleting them can free up a lot of disk space on your computer.
But before you start hitting that “delete” button, you need to remember that it’s critical to take a backup of all your important photos. In the absence of a backup, they will be at the risk of permanent loss if you delete them accidentally or if something like a hard drive crash happens.
But oh no! Did you already delete some important photos without taking a backup? If you did, you need to act quickly in order to recover them.
Yes, it’s possible to recover lost photos if you use the right techniques and act before deleted files become overwritten with new data. How does that work? Allow us to show you.
How deleted photo recovery works?
That’s why most advanced data recovery software suggest quick action if any of your files have become lost from your computer.
So if you have recently lost some photos from your computer, the following section will describe a few easy techniques to recover them easily.
How to recover lost photos?
Try out the below-listed fixes in the specified order to recover lost photos from your computer:
1. Recover from Recycle Bin
The first thing that you should do is head over to your Windows computer’s Recycle Bin and check if the deleted files have ended up there. If you used the “Delete” or “Del” key to delete the photos, most likely, the Recycle Bin is where they would be. Follow the below-mentioned steps to recover the files:
- Open the Recycle Bin by double-clicking on the shortcut on your desktop (the waste-paper basket icon)
- Locate the deleted photos, select them, right-click on the selection, and click on ‘Restore.’
- Exit Recycle Bin and go to the original location from where the photos were deleted. You will find all your photos back there.
Please note that this technique will work if you have used the “Delete” key only to delete the files. If you have used the “Shift + Delete” option to delete the photos, this recovery technique won’t work since the files would be permanently deleted (marked as fit to be overwritten) in that case. The same would have happened if you used the “Empty Recycle Bin” option without restoring accidentally deleted photos.
If you have used any of these methods, move to the next fix to try and recover lost photos.
2. Restore from backup
Until and unless you face data loss at least once, you won’t realize the importance of backups. Ideally, you should back up all critical data on your computer at least once every month.
You can also use any other cloud-based storage drive (like Google Drive or Dropbox) to save your data backups. Even saving a copy of each of the critical files on an external hard drive would suffice. If you have a backup of the deleted photos, you don’t need to worry at all, since recovering them would only take a couple of clicks.
3. Recover deleted photos with Stellar Photo Recovery
If you can’t find the deleted photos in the recycle bin and you don’t have a backup to restore from, the best way to recover lost photos is to use a reliable and efficient photo recovery tool – Stellar Photo Recovery.
It offers users the chance to recover JPEG, PNG, GIF, RAW, and many more formats of photos from a variety of storage devices like HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, 4k hard drives, SD cards, and more. Equipped with an intuitive interface, this software is very easy to use, even for people who have no technical background. The tool can perform flawless memory card and encrypted drive recovery while allowing you to add more file types to its list of supported file formats.
A particularly helpful feature of the software is disk image creation which lets you create a sector-by-sector image of hard drives that have developed bad sectors. This disk image lets you save the data on the remaining good sectors before it becomes corrupted. There are, in fact, tons of other data recovery and hard drive management features in this product.
This is how you can use Stellar Photo Recovery to recover lost photos:
- From the product page, click on the big green button that says “Free Download” to save the demo version executable file on your computer.
- Double-click on the executable file to launch the installer. This will guide you through the entire installation process.
- Once installed, launch the software, and from the home screen, select the location from which you lost the photos. It could be your computer’s internal hard drive, an external drive, or even a memory card or flash drive. After selecting, click on “Scan” to proceed.
- Once the scan completes, all recoverable files like photos, videos, and audios, will be listed in a tree-view in the left-hand panel of the software’s interface. Click on any file to preview it in the right-hand panel.
- Now select the files and folders you wish to recover and click on the “Recover” button to start the recovery process.
If, after following the steps mentioned above, a few of the lost files haven’t been recovered, try running the software once again, but this time, toggle the “Deep Scan” button on the home screen before clicking on “Scan”. Deep scan is a detailed scan that takes a little more time and yields better results than the regular scan.
In Conclusion
Photo and video loss can be a panicking situation, but with the help of effective recovery applications like Stellar Photo Recovery, you can overcome such issues easily. To prevent data loss on your computer in the future, make sure you follow these best practices:
- Adjust your Recycle Bin settings, so that deleted files stay there for at least 30 days before getting auto-deleted
- Avoid using the “Shift + Delete” key combination to delete files and photos
- Turn on “File History” option in Windows. This will enable you to restore deleted files from their previous versions. Turning this option on will make Windows track changes made to all files and folders. This is an excellent way to recover lost photos and other files.
- Regularly backup all your important data
In addition to the above, remember that if you have accidentally deleted important photos or have suffered data corruption on your computer due to which some files have become lost, avoid using your machine any further to eliminate chances of data overwriting. Immediately rope in a trustworthy application like Stellar Photo Recovery, and restore all seemingly lost files.
