For smartphone users, the camera has become almost a reflex: You see something noteworthy, you capture a snap, and you’ll preserve that memory forever. But what if that particular snap isn’t worth forever? While paper snapshots are notoriously hard to part with in the hand, digital files in your Android gallery are a lot easier to discard. That said, mistakes happen, and you could change your mind about a picture or video you too quickly threw out.

We show you have to delete photos from your Android phone and to recover them if you change your mind. The example below is in Android 10. While Android phones may differ depending on the operating system and manufacturer, the methods described should be fairly similar.

Got an iPhone? You can do the same thing. See our guide on how to delete and recover photos from your iPhone.

Almost all Android phones have a Gallery app that stores photos, videos, and screenshots taken with the smartphone camera, and images from other sources that you have downloaded from websites or saved from email or text messages. From the Gallery, you can remove one image or many images simultaneously. Here’s how.

But wait just a minute! What if you deleted something by mistake? No worries. You can easily retrieve and restore it to the gallery. Here’s how.

Google Photos is a five-year-old photo sharing and storage service that stores photos up to 16 MP and videos up to 1080p. The service is free and unlimited until June 1, 2021. In November 2020, Google announced that it will end its free unlimited storage for “high quality” or “express quality” photos starting on June 1, 2021. Existing photos are not affected, but new photos uploaded after that date will count against the free 15GB storage quota spread among Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Here’s how to delete photos from the Google service. The same method works for both individual photos and albums.

Beware: If you are using Google Photos as a backup in the cloud, or your Android phone comes with only Google Photos, do not use it to delete photos from your phone because that action will also delete your online backup. Make sure you are using the Gallery app on your phone (instructions above) or another third-party app like QuickPic Gallery Dark or Gallery to get rid of photos you want to keep in the Google cloud but not on your handset.

You always have the option of using a third-party software to retrieve erased images. Wondershare’s Dr.Fone and iMobie’s Phone Rescue for Android are only two examples of recovery software that’s available to the public.

Dr.Fone Data Recovery (Android) enables the retrieval of your pictures and a variety of other media data from your Android handset. It provides a suite of rescue and repair devices that lets you recover data from broken or damaged machines and retrieve data lost during any updates.

PhoneRescue for Android allows you to take control of your photo gallery as well as your music, contacts, text messages, and other essential files, giving you the ability to retrieve them quickly (and, of course, have the peace of mind knowing you haven’t lost anything). iMobie PhoneRescue for Android lets you preview and choose your removed images, so you can select only the ones you’d like to restore. This convenient software is compatible with all Android devices, such as Samsung, Sony, LG, Google, Huawei, Motorola, and HTC.