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That’s what I was afraid of. Any point trying root or custom recovery?
Agree with @Silas. People underestimate how aggressive Android is now with deletes. That said, desktop android data recovery tools sometimes still detect leftovers if nothing got overwritten yet. Not guaranteed, but better than Play Store apps.
If Trash is cleared, Android usually nukes the encryption keys. Recovery apps won’t work like they used to years ago. SD card would’ve been a different story.
Internal storage sadly. Phone is still working fine though. Haven’t used it much since.
First thing, stop using the phone. Every new photo or app install lowers your chances. Were the photos on internal storage or SD card?
So I messed up. Deleted some old photos from my Android phone, then later cleared Trash thinking I was freeing space. These were family pics, not backed up (yeah I know…). Tried a couple Play Store apps but they just show current files. Am I totally screwed or is there legit way to get them back?
Also stop opening them repeatedly in Photos app. Windows Photos sometimes worsens corruption by rewriting metadata.
Then those aren’t totally dead. Standard recovery tools won’t fix broken image structure though. You’d need proper photo repair software that rebuilds headers using reference images.
Checked a few. Some are zeroes, but others have readable headers and random data after that.
Quick check: open one of the bad images in a hex editor. If it’s mostly zeroes, nothing can fix that. If there’s structured data, repair might still work.
That flickering between fine and corrupted usually means partial data is there. Viewer reads cached preview, then hits bad blocks when decoding full image.
Yeah it’s an SSD actually. That’s what worries me. But some files do open sometimes, which is confusing.
If it’s an SSD or newer drive, there’s a good chance TRIM already wiped parts of the data. Recovery tools can rebuild filenames but not missing content.
So I recovered a bunch of old photos from my external drive after accidentally deleting them. Recovery finished fine, file sizes look normal, but now a lot of images won’t open or show weird blocks. Some open once, then break again. Did I screw something up during recovery or are these files just gone?
Rooting now might actually make things worse. Plus warranty risk. If the data matters, try a proper android data recovery scan. If that fails, it’s probably gone for good.