All photos are gone

[AndrePlayz]

I wake up this morning and check my gallery and all of a sudden, every single photo is gone. Albums, videos, downloads, all gone. I've looked to see if they were in the recycle bin, nothing there, I've cleared the cache, nothing. Years of photos and organizatiom just gone. Is there anyway to fix this or see what happened?

[bmw3567]

Do you have any cloud apps, like Google Photos or OneDrive?

There is a tool which will delete all media off your device once it is backed up to save storage. The process is automatic with some apps so this would explain why it happened overnight.

Another possibility is a cleaning app like Google Files or Norton Cleaner deleted the media to free up space. This is not default behavior though and is something you'd have to have set up.

[LongHiker]

@AndrePlayz Do you have your Gallery configured to sync to OneDrive?

Did you by chance clean out items in your OneDrive directory? If you did, they would have been removed from your device and Gallery automatically. 

[realaud]

Your photos should have been backing up to Google by default.  You would have had to specifically go into the settings to turn it off.  I believe that if you have OneDrive and are signed into it, the sync function is automatic.  Open Google Photos and see if your photos are there.  If they are there, you can re-download them to your phone.  You will have to recreate your album structure.  You can make sure it's not just a glitch in the gallery app by opening my files and navigating to the DCIM folder and seeing if there are any files there.  If you have files in it, then your pictures are not gone, and you should take steps to preserve them by transferring them to a computer or flash drive.  Who goes for years without backing up their photos if they are important?  Things happen and electronics fail.  If something is important to you, make sure you have a backup and a backup of the backup (depending on just how important anything is).  There are apps that will perform automatic backups and reminder apps to remind you to make a backup on a schedule.  It really takes no time at all even for busy people.

[MikenaB]

25 Ultra here. 07/29 my gallery app went into some sort of clean up and sent 99% of my photos into the abyss. I lost digital pictures of my parents who have passed away among many other important and sentimental pictures. Support was zero help.

[realaud]

Have you read the aforementioned solution?  Have you checked Google photos? Either open the Google Photos app or open a web browser and go to photos.google.com and check.  If they are there, you can redownload them to your phone and/or download them to an external device. If you have precious, irreplaceable photos, you should be backing them up regularly and have multiple backups. Those are also the types of photos you print out.  You never know when electronics are going to fail.

[MikenaB]

I spent an hour on chat with support yesterday. Very few of them are in Google photos. It's like whatever happened with gallery dragged them into the abyss with them. And they did open an investigation since this isn't an isolated incident. I found reviews on their app from the same day with the same issue. Funny, gallery wanted me to rate the app after this happened.

[realaud]

If they are missing from Google and the backup is on, I'd venture to say it was a Google issue. Since the whole point of Google backup is to preserve your photos if the are deleted from the gallery, photos deleted from the gallery remain in Google. However, photos deleted from Google are deleted from both Google and your phone.