What to do if you lose your photos

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It is very easy to live your life online these days. Between jobs that you can do from home and banking that means you never again have to do the Monday morning queue, more and more people are finding that dealing with life’s minor annoyances is much easier when you do it all from the phone in your pocket or the laptop in the living room. And with that computer in your pocket, you take a lot of photos, right? But what happens when you lose them all? That nerve-wracking moment when you can’t find your phone, or the terribly missed heartbeat as you drop your laptop? What happens if you get burgled or get a virus that wipes your photo album, Cloud file or phone memory clean?

Don’t Panic

While it may feel like the end of the world, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Your pics may have vanished for now, but that doesn’t mean that they’re gone forever. There are ways of recovering lost files and other kinds of data, so it’s a matter of being patient and working through the available options. Firstly, if you’re using Google Drive or Google Photos and it’s simply a matter of losing your phone, you can relax. Your pictures are still exactly where they were (although you may want to change your password ASAP). Just log in from another device, and your files are exactly where they should be. Panic over.

What if They’ve Been Stolen?

For more extreme cases of loss or even theft, there is a whole branch of computer and digital forensics that specializes in retrieving lost, stolen or hidden data, no matter the circumstances. While they may get the big bucks for their work with law enforcement agencies, that doesn’t mean they are out of your reach, and they can do a lot more than just retrieve lost data as well. If you make a living from your photography skills, and someone has stolen some of your work and either a) held it ransom or b) sold it themselves, then building up evidence against these criminals is essential.

Obviously, if what you’re after is simply a case of trying to recover some pics of your graduation that you accidentally deleted from a memory card, then there are easier options (especially since a memory card won’t delete your files until the space they took up is used for something else).

Needless to say, the most important thing to do is to take a deep breath and work through the recovery steps. There are so many ways to tackle the issue, and it’s absolutely worth taking the time to go through each possible option until you get your hands back on the accidentally deleted wedding photo or that album of your nephew’s first birthday of course. Generally speaking, technology is there to make our lives run more smoothly, and you’ll often be surprised by how well it works at doing things you didn’t expect. Even when you accidentally delete the perfect Instagram selfie.