Whether you’re going on a family trip after a long time or taking a holiday you’ve been planning for years, it’s certainly a fact that you preserve all your memories in the form of photos. Moreover, with cloud storage solutions like Google Drive, you can easily keep your memories safe and secure.
However, there are certain incidents where you might delete your photos. Such as lack of storage and unawareness of the folder contents. Whatever the reason might be, you can’t just let all your joyous moments get lost somewhere in the form of 0s and 1s.
Although it sounds impossible, there are several methods to recover your permanently deleted photos from Google Drive.
In this article, you’ll know about the various methods on how to recover permanently deleted photos from Google Drive. Let us look at the ways that can be implemented right away:
How to Recover Permanently Deleted Photos from Google Drive?
1. Ask Google Support team
When nothing works for you, it’s worth asking the support team for assistance. Google Drive offers both customer service and community support to help you find solutions related to your problems faster.
Here’s how you can contact the Google Support team to get help with your deleted photos:
- Open a browser of your choice and navigate to drive.google.com by pasting the address in the URL bar and hitting the enter key on your keyboard. This will take you to the landing page of Google Drive in case you’re not logged in.
- After logging in with your account, you’ll be able to access your regular dashboard. Here, you need to select the Help button located at the top-right corner under a popup menu that appears after you click on the question-mark icon enclosed inside a circle.
- When you click on the help tab, you’ll see another popup menu that contains several guides and troubleshooting steps. If you don’t see your problem listed there, you can either choose to navigate all articles, ask your query on the forum, or leave feedback to the support team
In case you choose the latter, the Google Drive support team will respond to you, asking for additional details regarding your problem. They’ll surely assist you with the right solution and help you get your deleted photos back.
2. Use a Recovery Software
The market has several types of data recovery software for ranging operating systems such as Windows and Mac. With these tools, you can easily recover your deleted data that may include files and photos. Here’s a step-by-step method to use a recovery tool for getting deleted photos back:
- Firstly, you need to download your desired data recovery software and install it on your computer, depending on its operating system. Once you’ve successfully installed the software, open it and you’ll be greeted with an engaging user interface.
- On the interface, choose a device in which you want to get your recovered data. Therefore, choose your desired hard drive and click on the scan button to allow the software to locate deleted files
- Wait for the scan to complete, and once it’s done, preview your deleted photos. Now, all you need to do is select the photos that you need to restore and click on the recover button
Once the software finishes restoring your photos, you can easily check them out on the location you specified for the recovery. Although the images may lose some of their quality, they’ll certainly be visible and completely understandable.
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3. Restore from Drive Trash Folder
If you have deleted your photos within a specified time frame, there’s a high chance that you’ll find your photos in the Trash folder of Google Drive.
It allows you to recover your deleted photos straight from Drive, without any external software. Here’s how to do it:
- Open a browser of your choice on your personal computer, and enter the web address https://drive.google.com/drive/trash in the URL bar, followed by hitting the enter key on your keyboard
- As the page loads on your browser, you’ll see a page with all the items that you’ve deleted recently. Now, you need to locate the pictures that you want to recover and right-click on them to show a drop-down menu. From the menu, you need to choose the restore option.
Although it’s a quick and easy way to get back your deleted photos, the Trash folder in Google Drive only keeps the items deleted during a specific time frame.
Therefore, if you’ve deleted your photos earlier than the aforementioned time, you need to look up other methods in this article.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is there actually any way to recover deleted photos from Google Drive?
Yes, there are many ways to recover your deleted photos from Google Drive. Start by finding your required photos in the trash bin of Google Drive. In case they’re deleted permanently, either contact the support team or use third-party recovery software.
2. Does Google Drive Delete Old Files?
No, Google doesn’t tamper or deletes any of your files without your permission or action. However, if you’re talking about the files stored in the Trash folder, they are automatically deleted after thirty days, considering the user doesn’t need those files anymore.
3. Are Google Drive Files Stored Locally?
No, Google Drive is a cloud storage platform and doesn’t use your computer storage for keeping files. However, you can easily make the files available offline and stream them online at your convenience. Moreover, you can also sync and backup your local storage on Drive.
4. How Long Do Pictures Stay on Google Drive?
If you have an inactive Google account that includes active services like Google Drive, your photos may be deleted after two years of inactivity in the account. However, if you use your account regularly, your files won’t be deleted at all.
Also, check out the below Google Drive tutorials,
- How to Share Videos on Google Drive
- How To Select Multiple Files On Google Drive
- Failed Server Error Google Drive
- How to delete files from google drive permanently?
- How to Upload a Folder to Google Drive on Android
- Error Creating Copy Google Drive – How To Fix
- Google Drive Files Missing
The Takeaway
To err is a human, and deleting photos accidentally is completely fine and not a thing to worry about. With the methods shared above, you can easily get your still memories back, even after deleting them permanently. Here we saw, how to recover permanently deleted photos from google drive?
Hello, my name is Shirley. I’m a Google Drive expert and have been working with the platform since it launched. I’ve written extensively about Google Drive tips and tricks, and have created numerous tutorials on how to get the most out of the platform. I also enjoy creating tutorials to help people learn how to use Drive like pros. Read more