3 Ways to Retrieve Back Photos from Lost/Stolen Phone

You can buy a new phone, but it is almost impossible to re-create the memories from an old photo. When you get your phone lost or stolen, you might want your data back.

But, is that possible? Turns out, there are some ways to retrieve back your photos and videos from the lost or stolen phone.

DISCLAIMER: The probability of successfully recover photos and videos is never 100%. These are merely the hope to get your data back. It’s not certain, but worth trying.

1# Try to access Google Photos using the same account from the lost phone

Google Photos is probably your best hope to regain access to old photos and videos from your lost phone. This app has a feature to automatically upload media files to the cloud by default.

This means your photos and videos may still be available on your Google account. Just sign in with the same account, and voila! Your beloved photos are right there.

However, in some cases, Google Photos did not synchronize your data if…

• The phone’s manufacturer disable the automatic synchronization (this is unlikely)
• The upload process only runs under WiFi connection and you were never using WiFi
• You have disabled the synchronization manually

If that was the case, your Google Photos data may incomplete or not available at all. On the other side, iPhone user also has iCloud which in general have the same feature as Google Photos.

#2 You can try other cloud services like Dropbox which has a sync feature

Other than Google Photos, some apps like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Amazon Photos comes with an automatic synchronization process once media has created.

If you ever used one or some of these apps, try to access your account again. Perhaps you could find the missing photos and videos there.

But again, if the sync feature disabled, then you won’t find anything there.

#3 Send a message to your lost phone to ask people to return the phone

According to India Today, a man from Delhi successfully got his phone back after asking the thief via phone call to return his phone.

To be fair, this man is so lucky considering the probability of getting your phone back from a thief is from small to zero. However, if you want your data back so badly, this method is always worth trying.

Send a message or call and ask anyone who found your phone to return it to your address. Promise them a reward once the phone returned. That could increase the willingness of someone to give back your phone instead of keeping it.

Or you can offer them to keep the phone and return the data instead. This happened to a professor from Sweden who got his 10 years of data back after the thief returned it using a USB stick.

So, that’s how you could return your photos or even your phone. No one can guarantee if the method would success, but if you don’t try you will never know.