In this article:

In the age of cloud it's becoming increasingly hard to lose something as precious and personal as the photos and videos captured with your Samsung Galaxy S6, things eagerly pursued by the big, resourceful tech companies who apparently want to know everything about you. Even if the idea of backing up everything has never dawned on you, there's probably one or more company had already took the initiative and done it for you, even without your noticing.

The cloud - The Photos App

When you first got your paws on the Galaxy S6 and signed in with a Google account, the phone's auto backup feature was turned on by default, if you haven't actively turned off the feature in the Photos app, the photos and videos should have been constantly uploaded to your Google + account. You should be able to restore your deleted photos without too much hassle, simply go to the Photos app – touch the menu button – trash, select the photos you want back and touch the restore icon. This will push the photos back to your phone in no time.

Or, if you have the Samsung Kies software suite (the equivalent to iTunes of apple) installed on your computer, every time you plugged in your phone via USB cable the software scans and automatically backs up the phone's files to the hard drive, you can update the phone to its previous status with the local backup and have your photos back.

At this point, hopefully you have already been reunited with your photos with the discovery of a cloud/localbackup, if not, there's still salvation, possibly…

Recover deleted photos from Galaxy S6’s internal memory with Dr.Fone

Requirement:

• A computer, such as a desktop Windows PC or a Mac
• USB cable to connect the phone to the computer
• Dr.Fone the data recovery software

The software involved is not as sophisticated and lauded as the open-source Photorec, yet the proprietary Dr.Fone is the only utility that’s capable of scanning and recovering deleted files from an android device’s internal memory, other data recovery programs, including Photorec, doesn’t recognize and list the internal storage of the Galaxy S6 as a workable drive when it’s connected to the computer’s USB port.

The step by step guide:

1. Download Dr.Fone on your PC or Mac, the program is a cross-platform desktop application, if you’re on your phone right now, time to switch to your computer.
2. Enable developer mode on your phone: go to settings, scroll to the bottom and tap on about phones, scroll to the bottom and repeatedly tap on build number till the message “You have successfully enabled developer mode” shows up.
3. Enable developer mode on your phone: go to settings, scroll to the bottom and tap on about phones, scroll to the bottom and repeatedly tap on build number till the message “You have successfully enabled developer mode” shows up.
4. Connect the phone to computer through the USB cable.
5. Launch Dr.Fone. The software will detect the attached Galaxy S6 and spend a few minutes to set up the recovery environment, in the meantime the user’s not required to do anything beside waiting for the software to run its course. The phone will restart one time before initiating the scanning and recovery process.
6. The scanning process lists all files in a favorable recoverable states and display the expected result in the preview window for evaluation, however, the picture previews are in thumbnail format that's only a fraction of the photo's original size, to get the full picture back, you will need to pay a sum to register the software. Note that If you do find your missing pictures among the recoverable result, determine if it's the actual camera captured photo or just a thumbnail by its size.

QA:

If your file loss problems can't be addressed by solutions proposed in this article, you can post your question in the comment section below, I will answer the examplery questions and feature them on the top

Other computer-based photo recovery software.

If the undeleter app doesn't do your biding, here's the full-fledged computer file recovery program, it works well on memory card and hard drive, but it may not be as effective when it comes to the internal memory of Samsung Galaxy S6. On my test the application fails to detect the internal memory of Samsung Galaxy S6, it probably won't work on yours too. Well at this point, it doesn't hurt to try.

How to recover deleted photos with desktop photo recovery software

1. Download and install the photo recovery software on your computer, the software is a full-fledged desktop data recovery program, so if you’re reading the article on your galaxy S6, time to find a computer. The photo recovery program is available on both windows and mac.
2. Connect your device with computer via USB cable, this step is crucial, if the device is properly mounted, the software should be able to sniff out the attached storage device and ask the permission to run a scan, however, since the galaxy S6 only sports internal memory, chances are it won’t show up in the eligible drive list.
3. The next step is the scanning, the scanning process is similar to other programs, iwt lists all the recoverable files regardless if the files were deleted or not, the result would be a massive amount of jumbled files, which can be previewed in the preview window.
4. Recover all the recoverable files to your hard drive, not the attached storage, and sort out the files with windows file explorer or mac’s finder app’s various sorting parameters – data type: jpeg, size: at least 1MB, etc…

Should I root my device in order to recover my deleted photos?

The purpose of rooting your android device is to gain the root access and execution right to the internal memory. The undelete app mentioned in the article does require root access to be functional. However, root is considered to be an advanced technique normally employed by developers, if you’re not familiar with the file system of android and trying to root the device solely for the sake of file recovery, you may do more harm than good to the established file system. If you’re determined to root your device and give the undelete app or any app that claims to be effective in retrieving deleted data from the internal memory, be sure to backup your photos, videos, songs and documents, everything on your Galaxy S6 thoroughly.

Frequently asked questions

Why is it possible to recover deleted photos from Galaxy S6?

When a delete command issued, instead of handling the actual files, the operating system merely removes the pointers to these files from the file allocation table. It marks the memory space where the deleted files stored as blank and will utilize the place when new photos or videos are captured. Before the area get completed overwritten, it is possible to retrieve the deleted files.

Why some of my recovered files are corrupted, only partially visible?

With the files deleted, the memory space of these files are now regarded as blank by the operating system, which will utilize the space whenever it needs to. If new data were written on the deleted files memory space, the deleted files could be damaged even after recovery.