It is no secret to anyone that WhatsApp is the cause of many problems with the memory of our phone. The Meta app is capable of downloading tens, hundreds or even thousands of multimedia files in a few days, which later becomes a real headache for users. This is why many resort to deleting the files of their conversations and, in many cases, deleting photos and videos that they never wanted to get rid of. How to recover them? Here we will explain all the possibilities.
The good news with WhatsApp is that it offers many ways to recover files if you made a mistake. Not all of them are infallible, but they can definitely help you in emergencies. If it happened to you recently, try one of these ways.
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Go to WhatsApp contact gallery
Sometimes the photo or video that we want to recover was only deleted from the conversation, but not from the WhatsApp files. To check it, you can enter the conversation where it used to be and press on the name of the contact. In the profile menu, all the files shared between you will appear and there could be the images or clips that you thought were lost.
Check the phone gallery
Another similar option is to check the gallery app of your smartphone, where absolutely all the images or videos downloaded, recorded, etc. are stored. Many times, this gallery saves photos by categories, so you may find a folder called whatsapp pics. You may find some already downloaded file there.
download it again
If the photo or video you want to retrieve was sent by someone else, it may be re-downloadable from within the conversation itself. This will only work as long as the user still has the file on their phone; otherwise, you will get an error message.
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Ask your contact to forward it
If the latter option doesn’t work, you can choose to ask your friend or contact to send the photo or video again. Chances are you still have it if it hasn’t been that long yet.
Use a file explorer
If none of the above methods worked, your file may still be on the phone without showing up in other apps. You can use your smartphone’s native file explorer or download an app to explore like Google Files. Then you need to navigate to Internal storage > WhatsApp > Half. This is where all the multimedia content of the app, sent or received by us, is stored.