WhatsApp has practically become from its arrival on the smartphone market in (2009 to iOS and in 2010 to Android) in the most used app around the world to send messages or any other type of multimedia content, as well as calls and video calls without forgetting the audio messages.
The first application that all users install on your new device or when you restore it from scratch is WhatsApp. Being one of the most used applications around the world, many users have made it their main source of information, a method for sending images and videos, making calls and video calls ...
But not everything is pretty on WhatsApp. The default application settings when we receive images or videos (with audio messages it does not happen) is set so that content is stored on the deviceTherefore, if we are very active users who send and receive (especially the latter) multimedia content, our team can quickly fill up with this type of content, content that we are rarely interested in keeping.
If we have been careful to modify the WhatsApp configuration so that all the content we receive does not store on our device and unfortunately we find that the image stored on our device is corrupted, does not display correctly, or gives an error at the time of reading we find a problem.
This problem has a simpler solution than it may seem at first. If you want to know how to recover damaged WhatsApp photos I invite you to follow the advice that we show you below.
Return to the chat where we downloaded it
Before we get nervous and think that we will not be able to recover the image in life, the first thing we must do is go back to the chat from where we downloaded the image. WhatsApp keeps the multimedia files on its servers for 3 months as long as we have not deleted the image from the chat or we have deleted the conversation in which it is located.
This is not usually a problem in most cases, since many of the images and videos are shared through group chats, so if it has not been three months since we downloaded it, we can still recover.
How can we know how old the image is?
If the image was shared in a group chat where hundreds of messages are regularly posted every day, the task of finding the image can be tedious if we do not know an approximate date. To know the date an image was shared and downloaded, we can use the Google Files application.
Files by Google is a file manager that allows us to know the details of an image, in this way, to be able to move through the group conversation and to be able to recover the photograph that is damaged on our device again.
Ask the issuer again
A resource that is sometimes the fastest and easiest, goes through ask the person who shared that image to send it back to us. It is unlikely that that image has deleted it, since if you have shared it, you will have some special reason for doing so.
Backup
If we appreciate the content we store on our computer, you will most likely do backup copies of all the content on your mobile regularly, so one method to recover that corrupted image goes through restore the backup to the device.
Obviously, before we must make a copy of all the images and videos that we have stored on the device so that when restoring the backup they are not deleted and we lose them without being able to recover them easily.
Google Photos
If you're using an Android smartphone, you're most likely using Google Photos, Google's free cloud storage service where a high-quality copy of all images and videos is stored that we store on our device.
If so, the WhatsApp folder will also be included in the backup, so you will have a backup copy in the Google cloud where you can recover it. If the WhatsApp folder is not included, the solution that Google Photos offers us is useless.
iCloud
Although Google Photos is used by practically all Android-managed phones, it is also used by many iPhone users. However, these have another solution called iCloud, Apple's storage service. where all images and videos are stored that we created with the device in its original quality.
Apple gives away 5 GB of free space, a space insufficient for most users, so unless you have a paid plan, all the images and videos that are created or stored on the device will not be found in the Apple cloud.
Other storage services
But not everything is Google Photos and iCloud. In the market we also have at our disposal other storage services that allow us to make a backup copy in the cloud of all the content that we create or store on our device. OneDrive from Microsoft, Amazon, Mega… There are many services that, through access applications, allow us to make backup copies of all the new content stored in the image gallery.
Image recovery software
If you have reached this point, it is likely that you have not managed to recover the image you need. Making use of image recovery applications is the last resort we have, a resource that does not always work since it requires various factors and in most cases they force us to resort to paid software although we can also find free applications that contain advertisements.
If we want recover corrupted WhatsApp images on Android, in the Play Store we have different solutions, all of them equally valid. However, if it is an iPhone, there is no application that allows this operation, since Apple does not allow access to the root of the system to analyze the deleted files, so all the application that claims to do that, does not it's true. The only way to recover deleted images or videos on iOS is through the Photos application, inside the Deleted folder.
recover deleted photos
This application allows us to recover images that have been deleted from our computer or that are damaged without our device having ROOT access. It not only analyzes the internal storage of our device but also analyzes the SD card and supports the .jpg, .jpeg and .png formats.
Recover deleted photos
Another application that offers the best results when it comes to recovering deleted or damaged images from our device is Recover Deleted Photos, an application that we can download for free and containing ads.
Like the previous application, Recover Deleted Photos is responsible for scanning our devices to recover deleted or damaged photos, it is compatible with all image formats and the device does not need to have ROOT access.
