Summary: In this blog post, we share the best DIY methods to recover the photos from your broken or damaged Android phone.
Jack couldn’t believe that his one grand Galaxy S10 was a goner… it had just ‘slipped off’ his hand and hit the ground hard. Lying dead on the floor with a cracked screen, the S10 made a painful sight. But the next moment he realized that he was in for deeper trouble…the precious family photos on his phone were supposedly lost forever…Anger and grief swept his mind.
You may be able to replay a similar situation, with worrisome thoughts of losing your treasure trove of photos stored on a broken phone.
The answer is, it depends. A physically damaged phone doesn’t mean total data loss. However, the successful recovery of photos (and the method) would largely depend on the kind and extent of damage to your phone.
Data from a severely damaged Android phone can be retrieved best by professional data recovery service providers in their specialized labs. However, there are do-it-yourself tools and techniques that can help you recover photos from the broken phone.
So, before you take your phone to a mobile data recovery center, try out the following DIY methods to recover the photos from your broken or damaged Android phone.
Contents
| Use AutoPlay on your computer to retrieve photos Recover photos from Google Drive Use Stellar Photo Recovery |
Utilize the AutoPlay feature on your computer to get the photos from your broken Android phone. For this method, the USB slot of your phone should be working, as it requires connecting a USB cable for the purpose. The USB debugging should be enabled so that you can connect the phone to a Windows PC via USB cable.
However, if the USB debugging is Off, you can see nothing on the screen when you connect your phone to the computer. In that case, just use an OTG cable for connecting your Android phone to a mouse and then control the operations of the broken phone with the mouse. Your phone should support an OTG cable for the same.
1. Simply connect your Android phone to an OTG cable.
2. Connect the mouse to the cable.
3. Then recover photos and other media files from the broken phone.
If the photos are saved to an SD card, then remove the SD card from the broken phone and insert it into another working smartphone.
Google Drive backup and sync feature allow you to access the photos on all your synced devices. You can easily recover broken smartphone photos on your computer with the help of Google Drive.
The app stores all your photos saved on Android phone including Gallery pictures and those shared via WhatsApp messages app etc.
Almost every Android phone has the SD card option to store photos and videos. If your photos were saved in the memory card, use an SD card photo recovery software — Stellar Photo Recovery. The software retrieves pictures from the broken Android phone’s storage card. It can also recover deleted or lost photos from damaged, corrupt, formatted, and inaccessible mobile phone SD cards. Read to know more
Stellar Photo Recovery can retrieve photos from memory cards of all Android phones including Samsung, Nokia, Redmi, Sony, HTC, LG, etc.
Carefully take out the mobile SD card from the slot of your broken phone and follow the given steps.
*The trial software scans the media and shows a preview of all the recoverable files. Once you are able to ascertain the effectiveness, you can save the recoverable files by activating the software.
Problem:
SD card of your broken phone is inaccessible or asks to format when you connect it to computer.
What you can do
Do a Chkdsk scan on your computer as per the steps given here. If the card is still inaccessible or throws formatting error, recover the photos by using Stellar Photo Recovery. The software can detect the
corrupt, damaged, inaccessible, or formatted SD card and foster recovery from it. Once you restore photos from the SD card,
format it to reuse.
Steps to perform Chkdsk scan
Physical damage is a possibility with any smartphone, no matter how much claim is made around their evolving sturdiness. The screen is made of glass and therefore fragile (maybe a few degrees lesser with tempered glass protection, etc.). But, a physically damaged phone shouldn’t bother you about losing the photos stored on the phone. Of course, a damaged pricey device will burn a hole in your pocket, but an emotional comfort is that the photos can be salvaged.
The various DIY photo recovery methods shared in this blog post are worth trying before approaching a professional service provider. To recapitulate the methods— 1. Try retrieving the photos from your broken Android phone by connecting it to the computer through a USB cable; 2. Use Google Drive backup (if available) which is a convenient option to restore the mobile phone pictures; 3. Try out Stellar Photo Recovery software to get back the photos stored on your phone’s SD card.
If these DIY methods don’t work, then visiting a professional Android mobile data recovery expert should help.
Sumona is a tech blogger, avid photographer, & technogeek with vast experience in writing about media file recovery tips and tutorials. She has over 10 years of experience in media file recovery/media file repair technology. She is passionate about Photography, Creative Designing, Music, and Exploring lesser-known destinations.
My Oppo A36 was broken last night. Now I am struggling to recover my photos and videos from the storage. I use a SanDisk memory card, and that is showing empty. Please help.
Hi Lee, There may be the possibility that your SD card got corrupted from the damage. Don’t Panik! and try all the methods shown in the blog. If nothing works, you can format the card and recover the files with the help of Stellar Photo Recovery.
This is why phone need sdcard for photos.
Now expensive phones removed that, so that all your data will be lost, to force you purchase expensive data plan and sync all photos to cloud for data mining.
Hi JanisT,
On such cases, you can go for Stellar Data Recovery for iPhone or Stellar Android data recovery to recover the lost data from your phones.
HI,
My Phone display is completely broken and USB option doesn’t, I have not synced my mobile photos to Gdrive, it is there anyway we can retrieve the data.
Hi AKilan, our software can recover data from a phone’s SD card. You need to connect the card through an SD card reader and run our software. You can easily recover your deleted or lost file from a Phone SD card. In case, you want to recover photos or videos from your android phone’s internal storage, you can try another free tool called Stellar Data Recovery for Android. Thanks!