Data Recovery Blog

Touch screens have provided us with a much more intuitive interface that can be used across any number of devices. They’ve also resulted in it being exceptionally easy to delete images and videos that we want to keep: misplace your finger and they’re suddenly transported into the ether never to be seen again… or are they? 

Retrieve deleted images from your iPhone’s ‘Recently Deleted’ folder

If you recently deleted an image or video, you’ll be able to find it in your phone’s ‘Recently Deleted’ folder. You can access this by visiting your ‘Photos’ app, directing yourself to your albums and then scrolling down. You should see this folder at the bottom of this page and, after you’ve selected ‘Recently Deleted’, you’ll be able to view all of the photo and video files that have been erased over the past 30 days (your phone automatically removes anything that’s been in this folder for longer) and can return them to working order by selecting them and then pressing ‘Recover’.

Check your iCloud account

In the event that you can’t find the images or videos you were looking for in your ‘Recently Deleted’ folder, it’s possible it was saved to your personal iCloud account.

If you’re not familiar with iCloud, it’s basically a cloud storage service offered by Apple. Anyone that owns a device running iOS is given 5GBs of storage for free and their device will be regularly backed up automatically. To put it another way, it’s entirely possible that the image/video you’re looking for is stored somewhere in one of Apple’s data centres and can be downloaded straight back to your iPhone as a result.

In order to check this, you’ll need to activate your iCloud Photo Library by selecting ‘Settings’ followed by your Apple ID then ‘iCloud’. Following this select ‘Photos’ and turn on ‘iCloud Photos’. Once this has been done, every photograph stored in your iCloud account will also be present in your iPhone’s gallery.

What if your deleted images haven’t been recovered

Unfortunately, if none of the above prove successful and you want your images back, you’re going to need a data recovery professional like Fields Data Recover - we have a dedicated team who undertake data recovery jobs on iPhones. Also, as the chances of a recovery diminish each and every time you store something new on your phone, it’s vital that you act quickly: power down your phone, box it up and send it to Fields Data Recovery for a free data recovery diagnostic today.