How to Recover Permanently Deleted Photos in Windows 10
Pictures contain those precious moments of our lives such as vacations, parties among other moments which we want to keep in our memory to remember the various nice moments. Unfortunately, it can sometimes happen that you accidentally delete these moments from your Windows PC. This is a really bad experience as it involves losing those precious moments which we intended to keep. If you have been thinking about how to recover permanently deleted photos in Windows 10, you will certainly find your solution here.
There are various ways that you can use to find these deleted pictures from your Windows 10 PC with and without the use of additional software.
Method 1. The Quickest Way to Restore Permanently Deleted Photos in Windows
This is not only the quickest way of recovering your photos, it is equally the best way of recovering your photos as it offers you a higher chance of recovering your pictures. Data recovery software works on the basis of reconstructing files from their previous location before deletion. Every file has its structure before it is being deleted so when it is accidentally deleted, it can be recovered from this file structure.
It is important to note that for this method to work, you should not modify the previous location of the deleted files. When installing the data recovery software, you should install it on a different hard drive or in an external hard drive. This is because, if you install the data recovery software in the same path as that of the deleted pictures, you might modify the structures of the deleted files making recovery impossible.
1. Download the Best Photo Recovery Software – iBeesoft Data Recovery
The best photo recovery software you can use to get back your pictures is iBeesoft Data Recovery. This is professional data recovery software that can help you retrieve permanently deleted photos from Windows 10 easily and efficiently. No matter you deleted pictures on Windows 10 PC internal hard disk, external hard drives, SD cards, or cameras, you can use the software to recover them easily. Besides deletion, it supports various data lost scenarios, formatting, system errors, factory reset, virus attack, and more.
The picture recovery tool is free to trial. It will display all the recoverable photos deleted from Windows 10 PC for you. Download it to have a try!
2. How to Recover Permanently Deleted Photos in Windows 10 with Software
- Once you have installed the best photo recovery app, it will automatically launch the app. If it does not launch the app, you can launch it yourself by double-clicking on the desktop shortcut.
- When the photo recovery software for Windows 10 opens, you will see different locations which are the different partitions and drives of your computer. Select the location of the photos that you lost and click on the "Scan" button which is found on the side.
- The software for recover deleted files in Windows 10 will start searching for the lost files and on the left of the window; the different file folders found in the chosen location will be displayed.
- Check the folder in which the photos were found by clicking on it. Then preview the photos and if they are what you desire, click on "Recover" to recover the photos.
Method 2. Get Permanently Deleted Photos Back from Previous Version
Another method of recovering your deleted photos is to get back the photos from the previous version. For you to be able to use this method, you should be able to remember the location the pictures occupied before they were deleted. To find permanently deleted photos from previous versions,
- Go to the folder that contains the photos.
- Right-click on it and click on Restore Previous Version. You can also access this by going to the properties of the folder then clicking on the "Restore Previous Version" tab.
- Select a version of the folder that existed before the photos were deleted from the folder and double click on it to open it.
- Finally, click on the "Restore" button to restore the previous version of that folder (It will replace the present version of the folder). In case the restore button is not available; pull the photos from the previous version to a new location on your computer. Once you do this, it will save the photos to that new location.
For you to be able to find previous versions, you need to have enabled previous versions before the incident without which there will be no previous version.
Method 3. Retrieve Permanently Deleted Photos from File History
File History when turned on automatically makes backups of your files (excluding apps and programs since they can always be reinstalled). The number of backups you have depends on the time you turn on your file history backups. These files include the photos you might have accidentally deleted permanently.
To use file history to view your updates available and recover permanently deleted pictures on Windows 10,
- Click on the File Explorer. You can search for it using the search button after clicking on the "Start" button in the toolbar.
- From there, go to the folder which contained the photos you deleted and open it.
- Click on the home tab then click on the "History" button. This will enable you to see your backed up folders.
- Search through to see the folders that contained your pictures. If you want to restore the entire folder, open the folder. If the photos are not in a particular folder proceed to the next step.
- Using the left and right arrows, move between the different versions of the files that were backed up. For newer versions, click on the right arrow and click on the left arrow for the previous versions. Click and open the different folders to see if it is the backup which has the photos.
- Once you see the photos or the folder containing the photos in one of the backups, click on "Restore". It will restore these photos or the folder to the same position where they were originally found. If a file or folder that has the same name as what you want to restore is still present in that location, it will now depend on you to;
- Replace the file in the destination; in a case where you need only the old file and confirm the older version is the better version.
- Skip the file; if you don’t want to restore that particular file or folder.
- Compare info for both of the files; This puts you in a better position to choose which file you prefer better and in the best of cases you can keep both files in which case Windows will only change the name of the incoming file or folder by adding a number to its name. This is the recommended choice.
Once you are done, you can close the file history and your photos will be recovered.
Using one of these three methods, you are almost guaranteed to get your photos back. With the second and third methods, you can only restore the photos if you had enabled previous versions and or file history backups. In case they were not turned on, these methods will not work. On the other hand, the first method using iBeesoft Data Recovery will always guarantee a safe deleted photo recovery process if you follow the steps effectively. Hence this is the best choice of methods to find your data.