Read time: 3 minutes
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging applications in today’s time. With several versatile features like end-to-end encryption, cross-platform compatibility, and its free of cost service, it has become immensely popular as compared to other messaging applications. Boasting a user base of 2 million monthly users, it is available for Android, iPhone and desktop.
There can be scenarios when for any reason, you lose any photo or video from your WhatsApp account. Users might have accidentally deleted it from their phone while deleting the chats or the person who sent the photos may have removed the photos from their side. Read ahead to learn how to recover deleted WhatsApp photos easily.
Reasons why WhatsApp photos might get deleted
There might be a few reasons why your WhatsApp photos got deleted from your device. Some of the most common reasons are:
- Clearing cache: Sometimes clearing cache can result in WhatsApp photos getting deleted.
- Accidental deletion: There’s a chance you might’ve deleted the needed photos while clearing out junk from your phone.
- View once feature: If the view once feature or the disappearing message feature is enabled in your WhatsApp then the sent media won’t be saved in your gallery and will be deleted in a short while.
- Photo deleted by sender: If the photo is deleted by the sender from their device (using delete for everyone feature), it will get inaccessible from the chat as well.
Recover deleted WhatsApp photos from your android phone
There’s a chance users can recover WhatsApp photos from their android phone. We’ve listed some methods below to recover your lost photos easily.
Method 1. WhatsApp Photo Recovery from Google Drive
If you have backed up your WhatsApp chats and media files to Google Drive, then you can restore the same to your device. To do so, follow the steps below:
- Uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp on your device.
- Follow the instructions to install WhatsApp and verify your phone number.
- WhatsApp will find Google backup. Press Restore for restoring chats and media from Google Drive.
- When restoring process is complete, press Next. All the restored chats will appear and restoring of media files will start.
Note: Sometimes restored photos and images fail to open after recovery because the media files are compressed and then stored on Cloud to save space which may lead to corruption of some files.
You can recover deleted media files from local backup. To do so follow the steps given below:
- Download any file manager app on your computer.
- Open the file manager and find the folder “sdcard/whatsApp/Databases.”
- If there is no SD card on your device or there is no file on SD card, then instead of sdcard see main storage or internal storage.
- Find the file with name like, msgstore-YYYY-MM-DD.1.db.crypt12 and rename it as msgstore.db.crypt12.
- Uninstall and reinstall WhatsApp.
- Verify your phone number.
- Press Restore. This will restore the backup and you will find your photos.
Method 3. Check device’s gallery
Look for the deleted WhatsApp photos in your device’s gallery to see if you can find them there. Typically, WhatsApp saves a copy of the photos received in chats to device’s gallery. In Android particularly, there’s a dedicated folder named WhatsApp Images where all the photos are stored. So, there’s a chance that you might find the required photos in your device’s gallery.
Method 4. Ask the person to resend the image
Try asking the other person to send the photos again to see if you can recover them. Unless the photo isn’t deleted either from the receiver’s end or you haven’t clicked on Delete for everyone, photos can still be recovered from the receiver’s end.
Recover deleted WhatsApp photos using an automated tool
For situations when you do not have any kind of backup of your WhatsApp images that were lost on your PC, then Kernel Photo Recovery is an efficient tool which is going to be helpful. It is easy-to-use and safe Photo Recovery tool to recover all the lost or inaccessible photos from your PC. It supports the recovery of any format irrespective of the number of images. Keeping integrity of the images intact is an advantage of this tool.
Note: Usually most of the photos are in the form of JPEG/JPG files. In case they get corrupted or damaged or become inaccessible, Kernel Photo Recovery tool helps you recover corrupted JPEG & JPG files easily and accurately.
Conclusion
WhatsApp has emerged to be a leading communication platform that’s extensively used for sharing texts, images, documents etc. In the present blog, we discussed how you can recover your deleted or lost WhatsApp images when you have backup and when you do not have backup. We have also talked about Kernel Photo Recovery, an easy-to-use tool which recovers all the deleted images of your WhatsApp account. It provides a preview of the recovered images and allows you to select images and save them in any location of your choice. Moreover, you can recover images irrespective of their number with complete integrity.
