As soon as you see that an important image on your device has been deleted accidentally or due to a crash, the panic comes into full force. People start scouring every single file or location where the photo can be, be it device storage, cloud storage, or any other place. 

Well, what if you are not able to locate the image? The answer is pretty simple: you can still recover your deleted photos if they are present somewhere on the device. If the existing file has been overwritten with other data, then it might be impossible for you to recover images, but if it has not been done yet, then there are a few methods that allow you to recover erased pictures. So, get ready to learn how to recover erased photos. 

What is the common procedure to recover deleted photos?

If you have an iPhone backup on your Windows device, AltTunes can help you look through backups, export iPhone photos to a PC, and bring back chosen stuff instead of erasing the entire phone. 

It is not some magical “come back from nothing” recovery tool for pics that no longer exist anywhere. Still, it can be pretty handy when the photos are actually stored inside a backup that matches your situation.

1. Start with the simple places. Check the Recently Deleted or Trash folder first. iPhone iCloud Photos, Mac Photos, Google Photos, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Windows all have some temporary recovery space, you know, like a holding area where you might find your pictures.

2. Then check synced devices. A photo that gets deleted in iCloud Photos may update everywhere, but a device that has been offline may still keep a local copy. So it can look “gone” in one place, while staying alive on another.

3. After that, check backups. Try iCloud Backup, Finder / iTunes backups, Time Machine, File History, OneDrive backup, or another backup utility. This is where the most reliable trail usually is.

4. Also stop using the drive or the SD card. On local storage, new files can overwrite the deleted photo data, which makes recovery much harder. If you keep writing to the storage, chances drop fast.

5. Use recovery software only when it matches the storage type. It may help with SD cards, external drives, and certain computer drives. But it usually cannot “pull” genuinely deleted photos from a modern iPhone without a proper backup in place.

What “permanently deleted” really means?

“Permanently deleted” does not always mean the same thing, not in practice. On iPhone and Mac Photos, it normally means the photo has left the Recently Deleted album. Apple keeps deleted photos in there for about 30 days, before removing them from that recovery route. 

On Google Photos, items in Trash can be put back while Google still retains them. After Google Photos labels an item as permanently deleted, Google says it can’t restore it through Google Photos.

If you are looking for an easier solution to complex technical problems, then visit Notchox today. You can also try out photo recovery software from Notchox; it comes with a free tier plan and it's easy to use..