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How to recovers deleted WhatsApp Photos and Videos

by Felix Omondi
recover whatsapp deleted photos videos

These days, it is becoming less and less common to hear cases of people losing their digital photos. If you happen to delete a photo or video accidentally, chances are high; you can log into your cloud storage account, and download the deleted photo or video again. This trick works mainly if you have automatic sync turned on for the folder where you keep your photos or videos.

You probably did not know that you can also recover deleted WhatsApp photos and videos. Yes, you can recover them, provided you did not delete them (in the first place) from the WhatsApp app itself.

Android devices

The WhatsApp app for Android works slightly different from the iOS version. If you have disabled automatic download of multimedia (videos, photos, music, and documents). Whenever someone sends you these files (or it is sent in a WhatsApp group), you will see them as blurred thumbnail with a download icon, and an indication of the size of the file.

Once you tap on the download icon, the file will download to your Android device’s storage, and you will get to see the video, photo, music, or document sent. The media will be stored in your photo or video gallery under the WhatsApp subfolder.

If you happen to delete that file, while viewing if from the (say) photo gallery app, or the video gallery app. Or even if you were viewing the document using a separate app (not having clicked it via the WhatsApp app), you can always recover such files.

As it works out, WhatsApp retains a copy of your files in their server (big surprise there), and it can only be deleted if you delete the file from the app itself. So if you delete the file from another application, you have used to view the file, which is not the WhatsApp app itself. You only lose the local storage version of the file, but WhatsApp servers still have the cloud storage version intact.

So you can always recover such deleted photos, videos, music, and document files, by launching the WhatsApp app. Go to the message thread where they were sent (now you will see the blurred thumbnail again) and tap the download button. The file will be re-downloaded again to your local storage.

iOS Devices

That said, the same thing applies to WhatsApp app iOS-version. Except with iOS, you don’t get to see the file size indication, though you still see the blurred thumbnail and the download icon. So to wind up things remember, this trick only works if you did not delete the file from within the WhatsApp app itself, but rather from another app. Say, from the videos gallery app, the photos app, or File Explorer app. If you delete it from the WhatsApp app, you also lose the version of it stored in the cloud (read WhatsApp servers)

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